


The Genius Factory || ATEEZ

by FromMyLibrary



Series: The Genius Factory [1]
Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure & Romance, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Dark Academia, Dark Comedy, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Crack, M/M, Minor Violence, Private School, Slice of Life, Strangling, Super Rich Kids, but mostly just life, hongjoong is a dad, i may have misunderstood what fluff is, if your life was messed up, rated for language, rich kids, thanks frank ocean, ummmmmm, wait is it fluff if they're trying to kill each other, wow theres no tag for strangling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:47:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 34
Words: 60,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22349773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FromMyLibrary/pseuds/FromMyLibrary
Summary: Welcome to the Genius Factory where the days are long and the nights are even longer, eyes torn open to the footfalls in the halls and the faint smell of chloroform seeping through the dorm ventilation.A chaotic dark academia ATEEZ fic (which has slightly diverged into a 99 liner homage)Introducing:Seonghwa and Hongjoong, 4th years trying to survive until their dissertations amidst a swarm of impulsive children they call friends.Yunho, Yeosang, and Mingi, a haphazard bunch of gifted and childish 3rd years who will one day rule the world.San and Wooyoung, two second years capable of destruction but wreaking annoyance.And Jongho, the bright eyed first year uncertain and questioning if all this criminality is really up his alley.Also, Mingi is Russian but please don't ask me why.(It's just rated for language by the way)
Relationships: Choi Jisu | Lia/Hwang Hyunjin, Han Jisung | Han/Lee Minho | Lee Know, Jeong Yunho/Kang Yeosang, Jung Yein/Ju Haknyeon
Series: The Genius Factory [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1638610
Comments: 46
Kudos: 87





	1. Classes and Info

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> AHHHHHHH! I just realized I never put down the classes and years for the story! Here's a reference guide.  
> I'm sorry it's so late into the story :((  
> I apologize to the negative 3 people reading this.

Seonghwa- 4th year, roommate: Juyeon (TBZ), declared major: medical 

Hongjoong - 4th year, roommate: Minho (SKZ), declared major: cyber

Yeosang - 3rd year, roommate: San, declared joint major: bio-chemistry

Yunho - 3rd year, roommate: Mingi, declared major: economics, declared minor: cyber 

Mingi - 3rd year, roommate: Yunho, declared major: politics and government, (also he's Russian because I have the mighty need for it be so)

Wooyoung - 2nd year, roommate: dead?, declared major: mechanics and explosions, declared minor: weaponry 

San - 2nd year, roommate: Yeosang, declared major: clandestine operations 

Jongho - 1st year, roommate: Chani (SF9), undeclared major 

BLOCK B: the engineering department, Lia (ITZT), Hyunjin (SKZ), Hwiyoung (SF9)

Classes:

DISSERTATION LEVEL:  
POISONS (INDEPENDENT STUDY): Seonghwa  
SPACE AS A WARFRONT (INDEPENDENT STUDY): Hongjoong 

3RD AND 4TH YEAR LEVEL:  
ADVANCED CHEMICAL COMPOUNDS: Yeosang and Seonghwa  
ADVANCED EPIDEMIC AND PANDEMIC MANUFACTURING: Seonghwa  
ADVANCED SATELLITE HACKING AND MANIPULATION: Hongjoong  
ADVANCED CHEMICAL WEAPONRY: Wooyoung  
ADVANCED PANDEMIC DISTRIBUTION: Yeosang  
ADVANCED CYBER SECURITY: Hongjoong  
ADVANCED ECONOMICS (ARMS MARKET): Yunho 

2ND AND 3RD YEAR LEVEL:  
HONORS INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT (INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES): San and Mingi  
PUBLIC PANIC: San and Mingi  
SYNTHETIC DISEASES: Yeosang  
HONORS EXPLOSIVES AND BOMBS: Wooyoung  
HONORS GOVERNMENT (NATIONAL ANIMOSITY FOSTERING): Mingi  
HONORS INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT (ECONOMIC COLLAPSE): Yunho  
HONORS INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT (ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE): Yunho 

2ND YEAR LEVEL:  
INCENDIARY MECHANICS (NUCLEAR): Wooyoung  
THE ART OF ASSASSINATION: San 

1ST YEAR LEVEL:  
INTRO TO BRIBERY AND COERCION: Jongho  
THE ART OF MISDIRECTION: Jongho  
THE BASICS OF HACKING: Jongho

4th years: born in 1998  
Seonghwa (med)  
Hongjoong (cyber)  
Juyeon (med)  
Minho (cyber)  
Vernon (econ)  
Hwanwoong (clan)  
Soojin (clan)

3rd: 1999  
Mingi (Gov)  
Yunho (Econ)  
Yeosang (Bio-chem)  
Soyeon (Bio-chem)  
Mark (gov)  
Lucas (econ)  
Xiaojun (med)  
Hendery (gov)  
Changbin (cyber)  
Chaeyoung (gov)  
Tzuyu (clan)  
Yuqi (econ)

2nd: 1999/2000  
Hyunjin (eng)  
Jisung (med)  
Lia (eng)  
Wooyoung (eng)  
San (clan)  
Yeri (econ)  
Hwiyoung (eng)  
Felix (clan)  
Yeji (eng)  
Seungmin (gov)

1st: 2000  
Jongho  
Chani  
Xion  
Sana  
YangYang  
Shuhua

Bribery and Coercion: Jongho, Xion  
Historical demons: Shuhua, Chani  
A Study in Psychopathy: Chani, Xion, Sana  
Inventors of Doomsday: Shuhua, YangYang  
The Basics of Hacking: Jongho, Chani  
The Art of Misdirection: Jongho, Xion, YangYang  
The Fragility of the Human Body: Sana  
Let’s Talk About Bio-weapons: Shuhua, Sana, YangYang


	2. Prologue

The sun came seeping through the tall, stone framed gothic windows: a faint haze of white light drifting softly through the trees and eventually the thick glass of the library windows. The tiled floor sat pristine and glistening in the warm glow. Yunho’s perfectly shone black loafers tapped slowly at the floor with a light squeak under the wooden desk, the fringes of the deep crimson rug barely reaching the front legs of his chair. Silence sat heavy over the labyrinth of shelves encasing his work station in an eerie quiet. His teeth gnawed at the nails on his left hand in contemplation. The sconce on the second story balcony, in front of the window, flickered incessantly in the background with the faintest click as it sequenced on and off again.  
  
“Where the fuck is my anthrax?!”  
  
Thrown aggressively off its hinges, the door splintered and burst open in a frenzy of fists and a barrage of what could only ever be known as Choi San. His eyes zeroed in on the boy as if knowing exactly where he was before coming inside. The three other patrons in the library simply stayed still and silent, typing away at computers and delicately leafing through the pages of their books. One of them, asleep in a tufted leather armchair, simply nuzzled deeper into the warmth, hair pulling out of a delicate crystal clip at the back of her head.  
  
A knife flew past Yunho’s head, nipping his ear and lodging itself into the bookcase behind him before he had time to process the boy had thrown one. It teetered for a second against the shelf before the tip pulled out of the surface and it clanked to the floor beneath with a resounding echo. Yunho flinched at the noise, as did the sleeping girl, and glanced down at the knife and then back up at its owner.  
  
“Where the hell did you put it!” he seethed, stalking forward with another blade drawn.  
  
This one was old and rusted, long and uneven. It was so dark with age and wear it nearly matched the blackened brass of the shelf plaques denoting the book sections.  
  
“Now, my darling San,” he drawl with a smirk, twisting his body to face the boy. “Why would you think I put it in hell? You know I’m entirely too busy to make the trip.”  
  
“I had it in my bag an hour ago and now,” he said poking his chest with the knife. “Conveniently,” he continued poking him again, “It’s missing. And after I took a study break with you .”  
  
San had advanced to where Yunho sat at a library desk, his thighs brushing his knees, as he now placed the cold metal at his neck, pressing into the soft flesh of his neck.  
  
“I know you took it, Yunho. That fat bastard is going to choke on his own vomit before the end of the week or you are.”  
  
He stayed still a moment longer, pushing deeper still until the skin split gently around the press of his knife and a thin layer of blood began to seep and coat the blade.  
  
“Bro, come on,” he whined. “I didn’t take it. I’m being serious.”  
  
San’s eyes bore into his so heavily, Yunho’s head began to hurt. He winced as the blade was pulled away his neck in swift flourish, slicing it slightly.  
  
“This was a stupid bet anyways,” San sighed, straightening himself and haughtily turning his attention to his hand, inspecting the dark red nail polish. “We all know I’m going to win.”  
  
With that he flipped a long curtain of silky black hair over his shoulder, pocketed the weapon in his hand and passed through the ruined door.  
  
Yunho knew it was a stupid bet: one of the worst ones they’d ever made. Mingi and San had gotten a little tipsy one night and one three-way blood pact later, they had all ended up here. He also knew San certainly had the upper hand. He always had the upper hand. It was San. But the boy smiled quietly to himself, looking toward the knife he had vacated at his feet.  
  
It was a stupid bet alright, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to win it.  
  
“Yunho!” someone whisper-yelled over his shoulder before sitting down next to him.  
  
He looked over to see the most beautiful boy he had ever seen in his entire life, smiling a smile that radiated more energy than a nuclear meltdown. His skin was like warm honey shimmering in the afternoon light that poured through the windows, smooth and glowing. The curve of his cheekbones led softly up to his eyes which sparkled in deep, rich pools of-  
  
“You’re bleeding on the Sun Tzu transcripts.”  
  
“Oh! Sorry, Sangie,” he smiled.  
  
“Trying to summon a demon are we?” Yeosang chirped, pulling out a mess of papers from his bag and laying the heap on the desk.  
  
“Nah,” he dismissed, graciously taking the cloth he had yanked from his bag and held toward him.  
  
Yeosang hummed as he resumed shuffling and ordering the pages strewn before them on the cracked wooden table, marred and scarred and stained with the passage of time.  
  
“Just a little bet with San and Mingi,” Yunho explained gently blotting at his neck.  
  
Yeosang hummed again staring intently at the task before him. A few moments later he sighed heavily, dropping the papers in exasperation, which cause Yunho to look up from his book.  
  
“Where’s the stuff about Sarin?? Is it not with the nerve agents? Why is phosgene here???” he softly mumbled to himself staring down at the pages with his face furled in confusion, hands gripping the back of his neck in annoyance.  
  
“Sangie?”  
  
“What is this one about?” the boy asked, placing his elbows on the table over the tangle of words.  
  
“What’s what about?”  
  
“The bet.”  
  
“Oh, um, Dr. P.”  
  
“Ugh, I hate that guy,” Yeosang moaned, dropping his head against the desk surface.  
  
“Hey, why don’t you take a break?”  
  
Yeosang raised his head to glare at him.  
  
“Okay. You want to keep doing that then?” he motioned at the paper underneath her.  
  
He pouted up at him, cheek pushed against the table.  
  
“Or… you could help me dust San’s fingerprints off this knife he threw at me,” Yunho offered.  
  
Yeosang muttered something in a tiny voice, mouth still resting on the desk.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Okay,” he drawled out.  
  
“Come on. It’ll be fun. Like the good old days.”  
  
The faintest smiled graced his lips again. “Like the good old days.”  
  
Yeosang waited as Yunho packed up his pens and papers, placing some of the manuscripts back onto the shelves in their places amidst the beautifully leather and cloth bound books.  
  
“Oh poor Yein,” Yeosang mused glancing at the small figure draped over the armchair by the window. “She must be exhausted.”  
  
“Yeah,” Yunho started, standing up, “she was still working when I left last night and when I got in this morning.”  
  
Yeosang pouted.  
  
“Well,” he motioned toward the door. “Let’s go.”  
  
Yeosang inclined his head in the way Yunho knew he was supposed to glean something but never quite knew exactly what that was meant to be.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Just give me your blazer,” he sighed.  
  
“Why?”  
  
Yeosang stared at him unimpressed.  
  
“It’s cold,” Yunho pouted, already knowing full well he was one second away from giving in to whatever the other asked of him.  
  
“Just give it to me.”  
  
He reluctantly slid the blazer off his shoulder and pulled his arms free, righting the knit sweater underneath before handing it to Yeosang. The boy stalked over quietly and laid it over Yein with a smile before turning around, grabbing Yunho’s hand, and pulling him out of the library.  
  
“Let’s go help you win that murder bet!” Yeosang clapped excitedly. “It’s been too long since the last time.”  
  
“Don’t call it that,” Yunho grumbled. “It’s sounds so stupid.”  
  
“Fine. Your mandated extra credit for Townsend.”


	3. A Typical Tuesday Evening on the Edge of the World

One might say the children, rather the young adults, who stayed there - in the unknown place, on the unknown cliffs, and in the unknown halls – were nothing but dark intellectuals facing the price of power. But it’s uncertain if it could ever be described as serious as that at all. These young adults, nay young leaders, possessed a surprisingly comedic disposition juxtaposing to the numerous and complex reigns they held. Perhaps, and this is merely speculation, their demeanour was a product of attending their parent’s and idol’s alma mater. Rather, this particular institution was the place for the rulers of the world, lest they ever be referred to as such and the current attendants toiled away viciously in hopes of achieving greatness… of course, by means of achieving some quite un-great.  
  
The school sat still amidst the tumultuous nature of the island’s weather as it had the night before and would the night after, and onward it would sit for many years to come in the rain and the snow, the wind and the waves, through bombs and cannons, through hellfire and heaven’s burning remains. The bridges and the buildings sat as they once had in an opulent strength providing refuge and home to, perhaps they should be called inspired. Children walked through the tufted barren trees at the dock of the island, those with the certain aptitude and displacement, shivering autumn through spring until they had become leaders who the world would fear if they only knew of their existence. The sons and the daughters of progeny made by and for them.  
  
In the middle of the barely claimed waters between countries of immeasurable power and force, the students somehow received news before the rest of the world. This was, of course, because they made the news: crafted it, manipulated it, influenced and determined it. It became a school culture of sorts to praise the awful little stories which were first whispered in their halls and then, inevitably, discussed in war rooms desperate to fix them. Girls and boys breathed to life sinful desires and strategic violence under their breathes in class to friends who merely winked and saw themselves to be dream makers.  
  
The moon waned in a semi-crescent in the sky, majorly unobstructed on the island save for the dense beam which emitted from the castle-like complex on the hill. The forest sat anxious, leaves singing in the darkness, and the waves raged against the shores but the school, tucked between large stone bulwarks, nestled itself into a faint comfort of shut doors and soft blankets. The walls of the compound rooted themselves upon the rolling and jagged mounds of earth, millions of stairs slippery with ice and cobble stones laid smooth with uncountable lifetimes of wear. It screamed power as much as it did money and intimidation. Perhaps it looked like a vampire’s castle from an old film or like the hidden winter resort of a European royal family. Maybe both at the same time with the added character of a mad scientists lab or a government’s foreign policy office.  
  
Waters stretching outward in every direction masked submarines and tunnels never meant to be found and only known to few. The castle walls held brilliance inside, hunched over tables covered in books and gadgets, chemicals and computers. What was on these pages and screens, in these machines and concoctions, was more classified than the edited redactions of any one country, because, as was per the agreement of new recruits, they answered to none. This was the only school where the skeletons left in people’s closets could be forensically tested before the whole ordeal which led to its placement there was covered up for posterity, and, likely, at least a B+ from Professor Reginald Bixby III.  
  
Hongjoong, a perfectly well rounded and perhaps surprisingly sane 4th year, meandered one residence in search for his friend Yeosang having long since promised him he would engage in a discussion on a new article he read about space epidemics and the possible biological warfront of the exosphere at dinner that evening. It was a rather intriguing concept but the bounce the younger had in him body when he asked Hongjoong, unbridled excitement just shimmering from him soul, had worn him down from any thoughts on having a quiet meal that day.  
  
It was Tuesday, Hongjoong’s mid-week sanctuary seeing as Fridays consisted solely of individual project research, and the sanctity of the day was certainly not missed on him as he relinquished it to Yeosang. But he loved him like a brother and he was adept enough in poisons to make him increasingly uncomfortable if he so chose. It was best not to cross Yeosang, or any poisons student who had an affinity for dramatic revenge schemes, enough trust from the professors to access unseemly chemicals, and, of course, the willpower of a hormonal teenager living without parental supervision.  
  
His feet padded gently along as he ascended the staircase, old stone cold and soft underneath the soles of his black loafers. An oxford of the starkest white somewhat sullied by a sweat earned from a brisk walk across drifted paths from one to another dorm did little to help against the usual weather, sleeves pulled long down his arms to provide an extra layer, albeit thin and mostly unhelpful. His hunter green knit sweater rested close to his chest under a heavy winter jacket, zipped past his chin and nestles against his lower face. Walking slowly through the corridor on the third level, he passed by the windows opening to the internal courtyard which sat empty save for snow and a crumbling well which, on more than twenty occasions, had been exploded, spiked, and/or used as a prison of sorts. He reached a door holding a placard of carved metal which a friend had made them all, years ago, bearing San and Yeosang’s names, tiny little flower vines loping through each of the former’s letters and the latter’s etching as if it was melted right off the wall.  
  
Light poured from the sconces on the wall, dingy and slightly hued to a yellowish glow, emitting through the hallway in an equally intimidating and welcoming atmosphere. The small turn knobs sat decorated with braided strings hanging from them. San had made them from pink and gold fabrics adorned with a small heart for himself and a star charm for his roommate. Hongjoong stepped into the dorm room, shaggy white under his heavy, wet boots. They would reprimand him later for that.  
  
“Why do you have a dead bat in your room?” Hongjoong asked as he walked fully in, observing a slumped figure and what appeared to be a small avian-esque carcass.  
  
Yeosang’s face lit up with an innocent smile, glasses askew and more hairs having fallen out of his ponytail than there were placed inside it. The usual box of cracking oak sat open, pages dusted haphazardly with small sketches and scrawled symbols. Inside sat glass boxes, some containing vials of questionable liquid and others beset with bones and screws and herbs. A mortar sat on the side, initialled monogram K.Y. on the rim. Hongjoong walked beside his and carefully extracted himself from his scarf which he then placed on the edge of San’s chair, hung over the back.  
  
“It’s actually really interesting,” Yeosang began to explain, moving a small herb stalk and leaf from one hand to the other, twiddling it subconsciously. It smelled rather vaguely of sage.  
  
“I’m trying to synthesize some poison which will render a body seemingly deceased but actually preserve natural processes in a coma-like state. I’m trying to stop the blood flow and pulse while making sure to retain cognitive exercises. It’s really quite simple when you think about,” he rambled, bent over the bat with a notebook and a heat lamp. “I think I’ve got it this time.”  
  
“So it’s not dead?” Hongjoong asked sceptically, standing beside his and pointing to the animal, frail body bent awkwardly beneath the lamp as if asleep.  
  
“She’ll turn out better than Saul,” Yeosang laughed briefly, more of an expulsion of air from his lungs with the faint hint of humour interlaced. “Her name’s Lexi.”  
  
“You name them? Doesn’t that make you more attached?”  
  
“No. Not at all. Wanna help me bury Saul later?”  
  
“Not really…” Hongjoong cringed. “So, it could be dead?”  
  
“No! It’s just in a coma.”  
  
“I mean it looks dead.”  
  
“Hongjoong I saw to god, shut up. I don’t need to be distracted right now.”  
  
“I mean Saul died.”  
  
Yeosang glared at him exasperated with a hard set mouth and turned back around to his desk, ignoring him.  
  
“Hey, is that a dead bat?” asked San with a hint of judgment in his tone, joining them in the room he shared with Yeosang.  
  
It’s not that he wasn’t used to this sort of thing, but the experiments had only grown more and more confusing to the other boy. It wasn’t as if he could ask his best friend to stop performing his homework or scientific research, but a little less wafting of what suspiciously smelled of formaldehyde might be nice. He could pass for a chemicals and poisonous substances major with his wardrobe’s scent and had quite frequently been asked questions pertaining to such.  
  
Yeosang sighed. “It’s not dead. Why do you guys think I’d just murder a bat. It’s for science…” he paused. “And besides, it’s just in a coma. Now can you guys please stop interrupting me so I can get my work done?”  
  
“Why is there a dead bat?” Wooyoung asked walking into the room not even a minute later.  
  
“Lexi’s not dead!” Yeosang yelled at him with a seething rage.  
  
“Woah,” breathed Wooyoung clearly startled by the outburst. “Just asking.”  
  
The stare on his face translated to ‘I will gut you like a pig’ which seemed to be effectively received by Wooyoung as he backed slowly out of the room holding his hands before him in submissive defence. He turned to glare at Hongjoong and San who were sprawled on the latter’s bed.  
  
“What did you want?” he asked after composing himself.  
  
San shrugged lying back down and Hongjoong tilted his head. “It’s dinner time.”  
  
“Oh right!” Yeosang yelled hopping up and grabbing his book bag and jacket. “San watch my bat!” he yelled grabbing Hongjoong and running out of the room.  
  
“No!” San shouted back already moving to sit at Yeosang’s desk chair before the creature.  
  
“Thanks, love you!” the voice of Yeosang drifted down the corridor as he ran to the dining hall.  
  
Hongjoong pulled his coat tightly around his face as the biting cold threatened to seep into his figure. Yeosang’s excitement made him forget his knit scarf behind and his chin stung from the howling wind which swept across their courtyard, crumbling walls doing really very little to protect against the onslaught. Yeosang zipped his coat and stuffed his hands into his pockets, still grasping Hongjoong’s quite firmly in one hand, managing somehow to insert the tangled monstrosity in his coat. Kids fluttered about quickly between buildings, haphazard blankets thrown over some shoulders and other bound up with hats and mittens. They saw one girl wearing what appeared to be three coats layered over one another in an attempt to stay warm. Hongjoong sympathized. It had taken him more than a year to grow accustomed to the weather here. He shivered staring at Yeosang in amazement thinking it was more a conviction of his iron will than anything else he was able to propel herself thrown brisk, freezing temperature he himself was also not accustomed to.  
  
They arrived at the dining hall, Yeosang’s energetic step and Hongjoong’s sore wrist from where he been unceremoniously yanked behind his for the better length of campus, old stone and harrowing ivy overgrowth the witness to his strife. The sky above them stretching high between the towers of the building, clocks on both sides, the one on the left set to GMT for London and the other to CST for Beijing. They both bore 3:00 and 10:00 respectively, rickety arms squeaking by as the hours passed.  
  
Coats and jackets piled on one of the tables near the entrance, nestled right inside the door beside hazy bronze scones, plush green and navy carpets giving way to the actual hall. The room was large and soft: a deep brown wood cascading from the walls onto the long tables which sat upon the lighter wood floor. Ornate portraits lined the walls between large windows, cross-sectioned with steel beams. From the ceiling, vaulted and high, hung chandeliers which shone more than lit the space, crystals dancing along in front of the mahogany panels. Cozy browns and a sullied white stone floor deepened into an earthly warmth which the students long treasured against the harsh winds and cold skies outside.  
  
They both immediately relaxed, pooling into their chosen seats by the western window. The smell of rich curry and a blended mélange of spices floated over to them. The tables were placed chaotically around the space, some facing parallel to the long-barreled room and others at an odd angle of sorts. Clusters of chairs surrounded more of the tables which were nearer the center of the space as it was lit better and those on the shadowy periphery held only a scant few seats.  
  
Yeosang and Hongjoong felt a body slide next to them as they chatted over large mismatched bowls of rice and green curry, cups of tea beside each’s meal. They looked up to find Seonghwa sitting there, book in hand, not bothering to gaze up. Without greeting them, he simply reached over and took Hongjoong’s tea, sipping it as he flipped a page. The book was large and thick, hardback and leather bound, which may have impressed the other boy in the slightest had his drink not just been commandeered by a friend who did not even bother to announce his presence.  
  
“Hey, Seonghwa,” Yeosang chirped. “Wanna join our talk about exospheric disease?” he asked wiggling his eyebrows.  
  
He put the book down and finally his eyes with theirs. “That sounds riveting,” he teased.  
  
“Oh come on,” he groaned in response. “You do… medical things,” he said waving his arms confusedly and vaguely. “We take like two classes together.”  
  
“Ah yes,” he said. “But I apply my focus more… realistically.”  
  
Hongjoong scoffed. “Come on how is this not chemical weaponry?”  
  
“It’s concerning a minutely researched foreign environment as an arena of play. I think that’s pretty unrealistic. I’d much rather be reading,” he paused to check the cover of his book, “invasive species of the parasitic nature, vol. 7: Angola.”  
  
Hongjoong turned back to Yeosang with a sigh and an understanding that had Seonghwa made up his mind on any matter, trivial to Armageddon, no one possessed the ability to sway his stubborn mind. After they had all finished their dinner, Yeosang wrapped a lemon square in some napkins to bring to San. He had an honors infrastructure class early the next morning and had spent his time cramming the make-up and recent developments of every foremost intelligence agencies in the world: ISI, GRU, MI6, RAW, Mossad, CIA, MSS, ASIS. San had the European ones down long since holding many debates with Mingi, one of many resident oligarch children attending school. Apparently, the BND largely outdid every facet the DGSE ever held, or so Yeosang had overheard on multiple occasions.  
  
The stroll was cold and dark. Hongjoong and Seonghwa gone to walk to the other edge of the island to their own dorms. Yeosang strolled through the stone arches swinging between them as the wind pushed his along, hair whipping wildly out of the collar of his red coat. He looked up at the towers around her, quiet and resolute, seemingly reminiscing of another day long ago when someone had done much the same thing. The howl of the breeze through the narrow stone alleys resounded deeply until it permeated the cobblestone and grass beneath, razing hell over the cliffside beyond the walled campus. Yeosang heaved open the large wooden door to his dorm and shut the night out as he went back to his experiments. his evening plans were over when he returned to San who promptly whisked the dessert out of Yeosang’s hand, announced that, forlornly and regretfully, he was pretty sure Lexi died, and skipped off to shower. Yeosang merely pulled out the shoebox from under his bed, swept the bat inside, and started his homework.  



	4. A Storm of Patience

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Does anyone else understand why I get Russian vibes from Mingi? Is that just me?

Yunho was seated, for some unknown reason, in a desk chair that had dragged unceremoniously down the corridor of the boys dormitory, from god knows whose room, and waiting to listen to a presentation, or whatever the hell Wooyoung had decided to call the whole debacle. Not that this was the first occurrence of such an occasion, but Yunho never grew comfortable or accustomed to the summonings. That was a lesson well learned from his first year when Madame Pomfrey insisted familiarity led to laziness which led to secrets becoming, well, unsecret. Constant vigilance was a must for self-preservation, in matters involving Wooyoung especially.  
  
His friends sat around him: San, Seonghwa, and Mingi in like-minded chairs as Hongjoong and Yeosang sprawled themselves on the floor. Yeosang’s head rested against Yunho’s thigh sleepily, as he softly pet his hair the smaller boy began to drift to sleep or what he affectionally called the ignored trappings of the night comas. Yunho coaxed him into a nap and smiled to himself at his soft snores, the warm and welcoming room filled with their friends lulling his into an expanse of dreams. Hongjoong listened with rapt attention as Mingi and San animatedly ranted about their latest class, energy and frustration feeding off one another. Seonghwa eyed Wooyoung, who stood before them now: eyes crazy, as usual, and machine scary, as usual.  
  
“What on earth is that supposed to do exactly?” Seonghwa asked, peppering his words with an incredulity well earned by any previous presentations given by their dear friend Wooyoung.  
  
“I can’t tell you! It’d ruin…” he spun in a circle, “…the surprise.”  
  
Everything Wooyoung did, every single thing from the time he unleashed feral rats in the basement of the library to the time he exploded half of the kitchen at the Halloween feast, was done with the flamboyant showmanship of an entertainer. If terrorists were meant to terrorize, to unhinge the sanity of safety and establish apprehension and doubt at every border, Wooyoung was meant to put on a show. Of course, terror was his goal, but that damned boy, entirely confusing and not at all subtle, would reach the end by the way of very unique means. Unique means which, currently, consisted of a cross between sci-fi time travel machine and the guillotine. Wooyoung did harbor a deep love for the revolutionary spirit, Yunho thought.  
  
“Friends of the order, esteemed guests, I hath bequest your presence at this auspicious occasion-“  
  
“No. No old English,” San stopped him.  
  
“It is in my most humble proceedings that I have accomplished what can only be called, a miracle and a-“  
  
“Why are you British now?” Mingi asked confused.  
  
“Is that what it’s supposed to be?” Seonghwa mocked.  
  
Wooyoung pouted.  
  
“Keep going, bud,” Yunho encouraged.  
  
“Well, the time for words is over. You will be astonished! You will be amazed! Transfixed and Bamboozled! I present to you…” he paused to drumroll his hands on his thighs. “Project number 57!!!”  
  
“I thought we were on 55?” Hongjoong said.  
  
“No, you missed the last two,” Yunho responded.  
  
“Where was I?”  
  
“I don’t know. I think you were in the hospital wing. Trust me, if you could physically get here, you would have been here.”  
  
Wooyoung shushed them annoyed and clapped to regain all their attention. Yeosang filched slightly in his slumbering position on the floor.  
  
“I did it like this!” Wooyoung announced excitedly and with a flourish he yanked the switch on the side of whatever metal contraption stood next to him. It whirred and clanked away like the secrets to life itself had been harnessed and unleashed inside the thundering monstrosity.  
  
Yunho continued to pet Yeosang, he told himself to help him stay asleep, but the reality was he needed something to ground him to this earth lest Wooyoung’s amalgamation of metal and wire managed to displace them: temporally, physically, dimensionally, or any other sense of the word. Or maybe, his subconscious nagged him, it was because his hair was so soft and silky.  
Smoke erupted from every orifice. The lights flickers in a trembling quake, hazy noise escaping from them all, encircling the room in a high pitch static that tasted like rancid citrus and blinded their sanity. The machine became so impossibly loud, they ceased to hear the usual howl of the wind or the cacophony of ocean torments and most certainly drowning out the chiming bells which signified an hour that had all but surely passed. A heap of liquid oozed onto the floor beneath, seeming to glow in the now dark room and the sizzling carpet underneath smelt like death.  
  
“I did not do it like that!” he yelled equally as chipper as before the atrocity miserably failed and turned around to face them with a confusingly innocent smile.  
  
Seonghwa simply stood up and walked directly out of the room, feet dragging slightly behind in his wake as if the weight of his disappointment tied itself like lead to his ankles. Mingi and Yunho clapped mockingly from their seats. San… he just sighed the exasperated sigh he inevitably knew would come whenever he saw Wooyoung’s face.  
  
“You’ll get it next time,” Hongjoong smiled up from the floor, scooting away from the acidic slime slowly.  
  
They all petered out of Wooyoung’s room before the warden came to collect an evidence report of why, for the 57Th time, he had damaged multiple facets of the school infrastructure without a permit to do so. Perhaps, this was why he lived alone. Although, by popular lore, it was because he either purposefully radioactively melted his roommate, or caused his demise accidentally by replacing him with a frightening real animatronic who, after learning the ‘compassionate empathy’ of Wooyoung, decided to stage a murderous uprising which Wooyoung then, begrudgingly, stopped by murdering what he assumed what his most beloved creation which then turned out to be the red-blooded boy all alone. Either way, murder charge or none, none of his friends wanted to explain to the warden why there was a hole in his floor and why they stole their dormmates desk chairs.  
  
Yunho hefted Yeosang onto his back, draping his arms around his shoulders. Carrying his limp sleeping figure through the halls, his hands wound tightly around his thighs, softly rubbing circles into the flesh. Mingi walked with him, whispering quietly about something Yunho did not care enough to hear but nodded along to anyway. Mingi fished the key out of his pocket and held the door open for them to stumble through. Yunho placed Yeosang onto his bed gingerly before turning around to face Mingi who then let the door slam closed resoundingly. They both immediately flinched and turn toward the bed. Yeosang snored softly in response.  
  
“You idiot,” Yunho mouthed.  
  
“What?” Mingi whispered back.  
  
“Idiot,” he mouthed again.  
  
“I can’t here you…” Mingi added, pointing confusedly to his ear drum.  
  
“Idiot!” Yunho whisper yelled, louder than intended.  
  
A groan emitted from behind them, followed by a rustle of sheets and a sleepy eyed face pouting into the dim room.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Yeosang, we’re sorry,” Yunho immediately softened.  
  
“Hey, it was you. You did it,” Mingi argued.  
  
“You slammed the door! You should feel sorry!”  
  
“I didn’t almost bump his head on the doorway.”  
  
“I didn’t! It wasn’t even that close,” Yunho seethed before facing his again. “I promise it wasn’t even that close.”  
  
“No,” he shook his head slightly, hair falling around his in waves. “Wasn’t you guys,” he slurred, exhaustion tumbling off his tongue.  
  
“Just dreaming about scary stuff ya know,” he continued.  
  
“Oh what did you dream about?” Mingi asked happily, smile dissipating at Yunho’s unamused expression.  
  
“Jail?”  
  
“Why would you go to jail?” Yunho asked.  
  
“I don’t know, probably assasination,” he shrugged, slumped in the blankets.  
  
“That’s your first guess?” Yunho teased.  
  
Yeosang sighed. “It’s not like I’ve killed anyone.”  
  
Mingi looked at him.  
  
“Okay, one person,” he amended.  
  
Mingi narrowed his eyes.  
  
“Okay, two people max. San can vouch for me I swear.”  
  
The last revision came before Yeosang’s body was falling backwards onto the pillows, curling into the blankets with a large yawn.  
  
“Why does he know?” Yunho questioned.  
  
“You mean why don’t you know?” Yeosang corrected cheekily, rolling over onto his side.  
  
“Yeah. I should know.”  
  
“You big baby,” he yawned again. “I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”  
  
“Night, Sangie,” Yunho smiled affectionately and tucked his in.  
  
He walked over to their sofa, plopping down heavily into the leather and looked over at his tiny figure. Many nights he had let Yeosang slip into his bed when he was too sleep deprived or lazy to go elsewhere. The school had far more serious and life threatening things to worry about than students in each other’s dormitories.  
  
He looked over to Mingi and saw an annoyed expression.  
  
“What?”  
  
“You are like a lame race-horse,” Mingi sighed.  
  
Yunho threw his arms up in confusion and offense, knowing it was an insult but not knowing what said insult was targeted at specifically given that occasionally (always) Mingi’s translated proverbs (foul language) missed a mark of understanding.  
  
“Why wait for your recovery when I can just shoot you now,” Mingi added.  
  
“What did I even – ?”  
  
Mingi shook his head and put his hand on Yunho’s shoulder on his way to the bathroom. “You are so stupid, my friend.”


	5. Carefully Cultivated Chaos

Wooyoung sat across from Seonghwa in the medical library, how and why the younger had gotten inside remain a mystery as the biometrics were considerably difficult to hack. Hongjoong had been trying for three and a half years to no end which was point of sore discussion. Seonghwa honestly believed Wooyoung had replaced one of his own fingertips with a mask just so he could come in during the elder’s research hours and annoy him listlessly which was, without any transgression, what always happened. Maybe he even had a whole finger somewhere in his bag. That would explain the smell, well, not entirely but at least somewhat. Wooyoung swore he merely enjoyed the smaller, quieter space and the creaking old spiral staircases which framed the study tables.  
  
“What does that mean?” a voice filled his ears as a long finger obscured the words of his book, pointedly inserting itself into his research.  
  
Wooyoung sat with his arm outstretched across the wood, a curious glint in his eye and a mischievous smirk on his lips, which was, more often than not, his unofficial uniform.  
  
“I’m not going to waste my time explaining it to you,” Seonghwa droned, picking up the offending hand and moving it out of the way of this pages.  
  
“Is this some sort of double replacement?”  
  
Seonghwa ignored him and turned to write in his notebook with a pencil that surely needing sharpening and scratched as it danced upon the paper in little scribbled movements.  
  
“Anything with phenolic compounds?”  
  
Seonghwa huffed faintly and hunkered his back in the seat, lowering his head to the table and fortifying his body around his study.  
  
“You could just use…” Wooyoung supplied, looking toward one his discarded note pages from hours before hand and handing it gingerly to him.  
  
“What are you-,” he began to chastise before his eyes fell upon the page which he had crumbled and thrown it away from his books in agony after having written it and not quite understanding it himself.  
  
“Wait… that actually would work. How the hell do you know any complex pharmacology?”  
  
“I don’t even know what it means. I just hear Yeosang say it all the time.”  
  
And the cogs in his head ran so fast around and around he felt as if he might vomit from the incessant motion. It was a barrage of firing synapses which both excited and tormented his tired body hunkered at the desk in the library. Seonghwa, in lieu of thanking or really even acknowledging his younger friends presence, rather flamboyantly snatch the paper out of Wooyoung’s hand with a rustle, slammed it down upon the wood, whipped his book back 40 or so pages, and began to mutter fervently. Wooyoung smiled quietly to himself as Seonghwa fell into an engrossed pit of wordy molasses, numbers and letters sticking to his body like sickeningly sweet goo. Time passed like this for what Wooyoung would say was certainly the better part of an hour and Seonghwa would swear was no more than 10 minutes and which in actuality would most probably be a half an hour before the quiet comfort of companionate silence was broken, and henceforth Seonghwa’s dissertation trance.  
  
“Hey, can I-” Wooyoung started to suggest before a hand was waved in front of his face catching his attention.  
  
Seonghwa looked him dead in eye: “No.”  
  
“But you don’t even-”  
  
“Go get some lunch, Wooyoung.”  
  
“Not hungry,” the other smiled back tauntingly. “Yeosang and Yeri made me a pill that gives me all my nutrients I need because he found out I was skipping meals.”  
  
“How wonderful,” Seonghwa responded, voice edged with sarcasm.  
  
Wooyoung stuffed his grease hand into his blazer pocket and rifled around for a second before producing one small red pill and delicately holding it like a holy grail between the tips of his pointer finger and thumb, stained and dented, before Seonghwa’s face.  
  
“Want one?”  
  
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Seonghwa asked not looking up as Wooyoung slid his legs over the arm of the chair, stuffed the pill back into his jacket, and leaned his back over the side like a stretching cat.  
  
“Nah. I’m on lab suspension.”  
  
“…”  
  
“Come on. Aren’t ya gonna ask what for?”  
  
“That’s barely even a sentence.”  
  
“I set Changbin’s leg on fire,” he smiled.  
  
Seonghwa continued reading not daring to give the other boy a reaction.  
  
“…with Chlorine Trifluoride. But honestly it wasn’t my fault.”  
  
“How was it not your fault?” Seonghwa mumbled.  
  
“He was annoying me!” Wooyoung chirped, sitting up properly in his chair. “He was all like ‘Ahhh! My leg’s on fire!’ and I was all like ‘Ahhh! Do you ever stop talking?!’”  
  
The elder grabbed his temples and exhaled steadily. “You are not baiting me into any stupid arguments today. I swear to god, I’m done.”  
  
Wooyoung crossed his arms on the table and leaned forward with an innocent smile. “But you don’t believe in god.”  
  
Seonghwa narrowed his eyes at the boy, saying nothing but levelling him with a glare before looking down at his scans again.  
  
“The president of Singapore is a clone.”  
  
“Don’t care.”  
  
“Deepwater Horizon wasn’t Russia’s faut.”  
  
“You know that’s not true.”  
  
“Yitzhak Rabin isn’t dead. He’s in hiding.”  
  
“Hope he’s enjoying retirement.”  
  
Wooyoung quieted for a second and Seonghwa almost, almost, released the tension in his shoulders before the boy spoke up again.  
  
“Shinee isn’t a good band.”  
  
Seonghwa threw down his book. “HOW THE FUCK IS SHINEE NOT A GOOD BAND?!”  
  
Wooyoung took one look at the fuming anger on his friends face and book it out of the room, stumbling slightly over the edge of the rug.  
  
“You’ll never take me alive!” he screamed out.  
  
“I didn’t even want you in the first place!”  
  
The younger pounding his legs against the hardwood as he careened around the study tables and through the door, slamming it shit behind him.  
  
“Brat!” Seonghwa called out after him, Minho leaning over the railing above to shush him.  
  
Wooyoung passed into the dining hall, the soft clanking of silverware rustled about and the scraping chairs as students around them sat, echoed against the tall ceilings. By the western side, the usual group of suspects sat joking together. Hongjoong’s pen scrawled across his notes in a faint brushing noise, a bowl of yogurt and fruit sitting untouched in front of him from which San had been stealing pieces of strawberry.  
  
Mingi munched quietly across from them, still shaking sleep from his eyes, cracking each knuckle loudly as he flexed his hands.  
  
“I’m gonna start a conspiracy theory,” San thought aloud.  
  
Mingi groaned deep in his chest, “You know those are pointless.”  
  
“No! Mine will work, Mingi.”  
  
“No, it will not.”  
  
“Yes, it will,” he retorted. “Why do you even care?”  
  
“No. It won’t,” he answered. “And because it’s stupid. You should spend your time actually doing real things.”  
  
“Fine, I’ll just punch you.”  
  
“Like you could,” Mingi taunted leaning back in his chair, arms folded and smirk, greasy and taught, stretched across his face.  
  
“We all know I could kick your ass,” San quipped.  
  
“At least I didn’t puke in front of Jungwoo.”  
  
“Okay, now I’m going to murder you.”  
  
“That won’t get you a good grade.”  
  
“Yeah, but it’d be worth it,” San smiled haughtily.  
  
Hongjoong desperately attempted to muffle a laugh as he continued to scribble away in his notebook.  
  
“Not you!” Mingi whined, pointing across the table, the melodrama of betrayal passing over his features  
  
Hongjoong reached over and high fived San.  
  
“Traitor!” Mingi sputtered, gesturing wildly at Hongjoong. “You’re not supposed to support this kind of behaviour.”  
  
“I know a waste of life when I see it.”  
  
“Heck yeah!” San smiled.  
  
Mingi proceeded to give an entirely pointless rant about the expectations of friendship and the calamity of distrust that now underlaid all his relationships. Half of it slipped into a heavily accented Russian that Hongjoong couldn’t pick up on but had San rolling around his seat in uproarious laughter. Accustomed to dramatics and hysterics among their small band of friends, Hongjoong refused to listened leaving the boy alone in his rant save for San who, with an elbow propping up his chin, stuck his tongue out in various fashions ever so often to mock Mingi, who upon seeing so would briefly pause to return the gesture. This was, after all, how they best communicated.  
  
“I have recently decided to stop needing sleep,” Wooyoung announced as he sat down, wedging himself between San and Hongjoong like a cat whose whiskers were clipped to an obscenely short length and now lost all previously held sense of spatial awareness. They all paused: Hongjoong stopping the hand full of bread on the way to his lips and looking up from his work, San and Mingi halting their mocking marathon.  
  
“You decided to not need sleep…” San said slowly, processing the words.  
  
“As one does,” Wooyoung added, shovelling cereal into his mouth.  
  
“As one does…” Hongjoong mused in response.  
  
“This sounds very productive!” Mingi smiled, clapping a hand on Wooyoung’s shoulder in support.  
  
“You know, I’m not even gonna touch that,” Hongjoong mumbled, distracting himself with a stack of printed code.  
  
San perked up upon seeing someone walk inside and startled them all at the sudden and jarring shriek of his voice.  
  
“Hey Yunho!” San yelled across the room. “Your dad know any oil tycoons?”  
  
“Dude,” Yunho yelled back “He is an oil tycoon now!”  
  
“Bro,” San elongated enthusiastically.  
  
“Bro,” Yunho parroted back, still a good 25 feet away.  
  
“Yunho!” Mingi called from his side. “Comrade! This one thinks he can make a useful conspiracy theory!”  
  
“Like the one about your girlfriend?” Yunho laughed back over the multiple tables of students separating them.  
  
“No! Like the one about his d-“ Mingi’s hand shot out to clamp down over San’s mouth, his eyes crinkling in amusement at his panicked face.  
  
“No Christmas uranium for you,” he pouted, drawing his hand back.  
  
“Wait, No! No please. I’m sorry. That’s just mean. I don’t deserve that. We’re bros, comrades even. You wouldn’t do that to me,” he whined.  
  
Mingi just pouted angrily at San.  
  
“I should call you Молния with how much you like to broadcast information.”  
  
“Mingi...”  
  
“You are a devil child.”  
  
Yunho finally made his way toward their table with a tray of food, placing a plate of bacon in front of Mingi as he sat down, reaching over to pet San’s back as the other leaned on Wooyoung in desolation. The boy continued happily eating.  
  
“You are forgiven,” Mingi garbled out around a mouth full of bacon. “This one is not,” he pointed at San with a strip.  
  
“Wooyoung,” he drawled hanging on the boy’s bicep. “Can you get me any Christmas uranium.”  
  
Wooyoung looked up at him confused.  
  
“I gave you some for your birthday last month didn’t I?”  
  
“I lost it…” he said quietly.  
  
Hongjoong’s head snapped up at that.  
  
“I’m sorry you what?”  
  
“I lost it.”  
  
“You lost a ton of uranium?” Yunho asked.  
  
“It was more like two tones,” Wooyoung added pensively.  
  
“That’s not better,” Hongjoong responded in exasperation.  
  
“See,” Mingi turned to him. “You get no Uranium. You will just lose it.”  
  
“No, I promise I won’t,” Yeosang whined.  
  
“This is why you don’t give young child uranium. They will only cheat you with it!”  
  
“Is that an old Russian saying too?” San teased.  
  
“No, the one about you is ребенок с во́зу -- кобы́ле ле́гче.”  
  
San scoffed and Yunho’s mouth fell open.  
  
“That’s a low blow,” San whispered, clearly very offended.  
  
Hongjoong sighed. “Mingi, don’t call him a ‘rebnoc’ or whatever. San don’t antagonize him. Just shut up and let me eat my breakfast. I have no idea how, but Wooyoung is the only one who isn’t annoying me right now.”  
  
All three of them looked down after being chastised while Wooyoung smiled cheerfully, a little milk spilling out the corner of his closed mouth.  
  
“It just means child,” Mingi pouted softly at the scolding.  
  
“I said shut up! Do you want me to call Seonghwa?”  
  
“No..” they all muttered back sadly.  
  
“They stay quiet.”  
  
“Okay,” the three parroted back.  
  
And Wooyoung, surprisingly, sat silent as he deftly ate his cereal. Perhaps, that was the most unsettling bit of it all.


	6. Welcome

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jongho has finally arrived !

“Welcome to the Genius Factory for acumen and intuition!” The school’s receptionist, by whom the students were asked to refer to as Madame but only ever called Tiffany with an affectionate ring, singsonged throwing her arms wide to sweep across the space of the expansive entrance.  
  
Her heels clacked on the floor resolutely as she walked backward into the open loft of a room, a wide staircase climbing the curved wall at the left and ending on the right above their head. The shiny black of her shoes sat against the wooded planks in a shiny elegance that seemed to just fit.  
  
“Within our humble walls,” she continued just as cheery, “we acquire children from around the world who show a certain… aptitude and enrol them at our institution for the purpose of protecting the progeny of us terraforming pricks.”  
  
Her smiled seemed to cease matching the words she spoke but she did not falter in the slightest. It was well known that should anyone – staff, student, or otherwise – address her with anything less than respect and dignity, it was not the school they would be dealing with but rather they would incur the uninhibited wrath of Tiffany herself.  
  
Jongho stared, bright eyed and bushy tailed, at the woman in front of him. She was beautiful, certainly; intimidating, clearly; and she had an air of importance about her. Well, of course, everyone did. He had never seen anything like the island where he now stood, under the stone vaulted arches of the outdoor passages, the stained glass as old as sin depicting great catastrophe after great catastrophe.  
  
The other kids in the boat had been, for lack of a better description (as his mind was somewhat faltering at the grandiose extravagance of the crystalline mirrors), privileged: privilege in their fledgling days which drooled from golden pacifiers, privilege in their later years seeping from wine stained rugs, and privilege even now under the polished heel of a tasselled loafer which squeaked as it spun around the hall. Jongho felt, again for lack of a more eloquent disposition which seemed to be evading him right now to hide under the ends of the velvet curtains, small.  
  
“The wonderful thing about the Genius Factory is we have alternative laws on campus.”  
  
‘Laws’ she said with a airy breath in her voice which made it all the more chilling to hear. ‘Laws’ she has said, and it reminded him exactly why he was here. It shook his bones like the heated winds scraping themselves over the dune tops to tickle his spine with sand and it eased its way down his chest like the tendrils of a toxins making a home amidst his ribcage.  
‘And why was he here’, Jongho thought. ‘Because I have to be.’  
  
“The extranational location of our institution places us at a supranational legality and hence national governmental legislatures hold no bearing within the walls of our home. But worry not children. There. Are. Rules.” She said pausing between the last few words to point at a different kid in the crowd which had gathered neatly in the lobby.  
  
The girl to Jongho’s right leaned over and whispered in another girl’s ear. “I bet she says national at least 4 more times before we move rooms.”  
  
“And my hearing is excellent,” the woman said straightening her back and gazing dead on at the girl who had interrupted her, the tight-lipped smile falling from the young girl’s face and the tweed clad shoulders stiffening under the heavy fabric of her blazer.  
  
“My little blue jays,” Tiffany’s smile came back, but it was hauntingly taught this time and her teeth seemed gritted shut. “I collect you, bring you here to this wonderful place of all things and you disrespect me.”  
  
The girl to which she spoke stayed silent.  
  
“How do you expect to learn, to grow, TO USURP, if you are but insolent,” she stepped forward through the crowd. “Little,” she continued as she walked forward again. “Vermin,” she spat arriving in front of the girl.  
  
“What is our slogan?” she demanded.  
  
The girl mumbled in response, clearly annoyed and not wishing to entertain the authority of the woman before her.  
  
“What was that, dear?”  
  
“A brighter tomorrow for the bright of today,” she mocking sang out.  
  
“And how could we here, at the genius factory, entrust to you such an auspicious title if you can’t not hear yourself speak for more than 5 minutes?”  
  
“Like that means something coming from you,” the girl grumbled.  
  
Tiffany’s eyes flashed an emotion Jongho was unaccustomed to before she gathered her breathe in her chest and sighed deeply in vexation.  
  
“Did you know we are the only school with an 100% international population because we are claimed by no country.”  
  
“Of course, I know,” the bratty girl replied.  
  
“Then you also know I can try you in the court of my choosing because of this…” Tiffany paused. “Or I could just choose to drown you like the goddamn rat you are because, you see, I’m allowed to dispose of arrogant gremlins like you without repercussion. So I’d keep your pretty little mouth shut.”  
  
And with that she had turned and was continuing through the rotunda to another room. She paused and looked over her shoulder at the group.  
  
“Coming children?” she smiled. “We still have much to see.”  
  
The group began to file through the foyer under the staircase silently, the shuffle of their steps echoing off the domed ceiling. Jongho stood at the back of the group and heard a bang resound from the room to his right. He made eye-contact with a rather ornate renaissance portrait done in deep crimson and gold oil before letting his gaze fall to the door frame which had the smallest black singe on his surface, still faintly smoking. He glanced back towards his peers before noticing they had passed him by and decided to let his curiosity guide him.  
  
Around the corner stood a tall and incredibly handsome man, well to Jongho he looked a man, bearing an equally incredibly exasperated expression etched on his features. This man, or more likely a boy Jongho thought, was standing elevated on a plush chair next to a smaller boy hunkered over what Jongho suspected to be the remains of a coffee table, a lamp, and a homemade bomb. Upon hearing Jongho, both boys’ heads whipped up to stare at him.  
  
“You’re new,” the tall one said.  
  
“I was trying to blow you up,” the shorter one pouted.  
  
“I’m sorry what?”  
  
“Oh come now, he only half means it,” the tall one again spoke, sliding down from the chair.  
  
The boy on the floor stood and dusted off his blazer, shaking debris from his foot in an odd one footed wiggle and ruffling his hair to rid the ash from it. “Well it didn’t work so I suppose that means I only half meant it.”  
  
“Why were you-” Jongho started before the taller boy arrived before him and all the words in his throat suddenly stopped coming out.  
  
“Seonghwa, 4th year,” the smooth and handsome boy breathed, extending his hand toward him.  
  
“Jongho…” he replied.  
  
Seonghwa smiled and slithered his arm around Jongho’s shoulders like a cobra waiting to strike. “I promise I won’t let Wooyoung kill you before Thursday,” he coaxed with a squeeze, guiding Jongho done the hall.  
  
“Wait I-”  
  
“The tour?” Seonghwa asked.  
  
“Yes. I’m supposed-”  
  
“We all suppose a lot of things don’t we?” Wooyoung asked suddenly and Jongho was caught off guard. “Like I was supposed to scare the shit out of the first year recruits and my stupid fuel prematurely combusted.”  
  
“He means this in the most lovingly idiotic way possible,” Seonghwa added.  
  
“Yeah! Now that you’re not dead, we can be friends,” the boy smiled. “I’m Wooyoung. I’m a mechanics and explosions major.”  
  
“And an idiot!” Seonghwa threw in.  
  
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to make friends,” Jongho replied slowly, very confused and now, on account of the minor kidnapping Seonghwa had just performed, very lost.  
  
“Well that’d be dreadfully boring,” Seonghwa laughed with a sinister smirk dusting his cheeks that quite reminded Jongho of the Cheshire cat and that thought had him entertaining the idea that he had just entered wonderland.  
  
“And I can promise you,” the older boy continued. “You won’t last a week without us. Hardly any of the first years ever do.”  
  
“What happens to them?” Jongho asked.  
  
“They make the wrong friends,” Seonghwa teased with a grin and pulled Jongho along through the school grounds.


	7. Midnight Milk and Cookies

Mr. Zimes’ sleepy footsteps, shuffled through the corridor like a unmotivated zombie in search of nothing but another step. He yawned and he stretched his wear bones. His body jumped at the sudden onslaught of noise assaulting the silent space. The halls echoed with a faint clanking of metal and glass, resonating off the still walls and tumbling inside the vaulted ceilings before falling through the air and slamming down upon the tiles of the medical wing. Caught off guard by what sounded like the manufacturing and detonation of a small bomb, by which he had vowed would not happen a third time lest the school question his position in the chemistry department, the man gathered his conviction up in his arms, placed it upon his shoulders, and thundered down the hall to the only door which sat ajar.  
  
He flicked the light on upon entering, squinting and blinking at the change before searching the room and finding a familiar boy seated at a lab table in the dissection room.  
  
“Seonghwa, might I ask what you are doing here?” Mr. Zimes asked as he walked by the boy’s workstation at 2 in the morning.  
  
Why he, or the boy, was in the building at such a time was unimportant and, quite frankly, probably either incredibly convoluted or incredibly boring. Such was always the case with a school like this. Either nuclear launch codes had been leaked through a student’s surveillance malware or someone drank a little too much caffeine to possess a proper sleeping schedule. Both of these had been excuses to similar cases in the past year. Last week, he found one of his honors students, Thomas, under a lab table because he was nursing a lab rat back to health after they had, somehow both, contracted an incredibly confusing synthesized disease. The two had made an astonishing recovery by the next morning.  
  
Seonghwa grunted, not looking up from his work. “Hello professor,” the boy monotonously replied, a habitual reaction of hearing his teacher’s voice.  
  
“Seonghwa,” he said again, perhaps putting slightly more authority behind his delivery. “What exactly are you doing?”  
  
The boy looked up with a confused face, glancing at the man and then the clock. He seemed to think for a moment scrunching his forehead and eyes together before returning to the professor.  
  
“I’m genetically engineering a flying pig to piss my professor off.”  
  
“Which one?”  
  
“Ms. B,” Seonghwa mumbled.  
  
Mr. Zimes seemed to mull it over for a second, rubbing his hands together in though where they rested clasped in front of him. The man eventually nodded and smiled. “Carry on then.”  
6 hours later and Seonghwa stood, heavily caffeinated and swaying on his feet, in front of San’s class.  
  
“You know you’re nicer than people say you are,” San said as he exited the room and joined his friend.  
  
“People think I’m mean?” Seonghwa asked.  
  
“Well...”  
  
“Fuck you.”  
  
“That’s why!” San yelled pointing at him dramatically.  
  
They passed by the lockers where he put down his papers and binders and the plush leather bound kit which held his knives. San searched for his notebook under the stacks of random paper and small knives scattered about his locker which had been in a constant state of mess since his first year. It was a wonder how the boy’s hands weren’t scarred beyond belief seeing as he fearlessly plunging his hand into the chaotic scraps and piles without a care in a world and occasionally resurfaced it clutching 7 inch blades.  
  
Just then Jungwoo passed by and of course San noticed, not with his eyes but his nose. He had catalogued his cologne and every distant whiff alerted him immediately of the 3rd year’s presence. He looked over his shoulder at him. They locked eyes. San smiled and then tilted his head in confusion as Jungwoo’s expression changed from joyful conversation with his friends to a terrified and slightly sheepish expression and darting off toward the stairwell.  
  
“What did you tell Jungwoo,” San gritted out.  
  
Seonghwa leaned into the lock more, his spine liquifying in nonchalance. “What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean,” he huffed, “why did he just give me a weird look?”  
  
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Someone probably told him you’re his stalker or something,” he shrugged.  
  
“Seonghwa!”  
  
“What it’s not like I told him you’ve been in love with him for three years,” he taunting and then raised his eyebrow at him. “…Or did I?”  
  
San swung the stack of books he had just moments before laid on the shelf at Seonghwa’s arm, sending a resounding smack to echo down the corridor, the boy’s surprised yelp following after.  
  
“San, sweetie, get over it.”  
  
“I can’t believe you told him!” he growled.  
  
“I didn’t tell him anything.”  
  
“Oh my god,” San breathed out horrified, turning towards the direction the boy of the hour had just walked. “He knows about Kabul.”  
  
He turned back to the elder beside him slowly in realization. Seonghwa was obliviously massaging his arm with a comical pout on his lips.  
  
“You told him about _Kabul_ ?!” San almost screamed before Seonghwa clapped a hand over the younger's mouth.  
  
“ _I_ didn’t tell him about Kabul!”  
  
“It’s the same goddamn thing!” he screeched, ripping his hand away in anger and embarrassment. “How could you, you colossal fuck up?!”  
  
“It’s not like I did anything wrong, San, really. It was so funny you couldn’t expect me not to tell _anyone_.”  
  
“YOU TOLD _JUNGWOO_!”  
  
“Ten told Jungwoo actually,” he smirked.  
  
“I fucking hate you!” he screamed, slamming the lock shut and stomping away from the other in a flurry.  
  
Seonghwa pushed off the wall to follow him. San whipped back around and abruptly slapped him across the face, the sound halting the curious murmurs which had been growing around them. Everyone froze.  
  
“You have no decency! You’re such a prick! Walking around without any ounce of loyalty!”  
  
“San, it’s not that big of a deal.”  
  
“It is to me!” he yelled back, ignoring the whispers and the crowd gathering. “God, you’re so… so selfish! It’s really important to me and you don’t care!”  
  
“Well maybe, if you care so much, you shouldn’t have done it!”  
  
San, with narrowed eyes and a trembling lip, raised his hand again to strike like a cobra before he caught the younger’s wrist, grabbing it so tightly his knuckles turned white.  
  
“Don’t you bloody touch me again.”  
  
San huffed and tore his hand away.  
  
“I’m disowning you,” Seonghwa eventually said, a now painfully sober expression etched on his features.  
  
“Can’t!” he squealed mockingly. “I already made you sign a contract!”  
  
“Maybe I’ll break it!” he shouted back before catching his tongue with wide eyes.  
  
A contract, a bloody contract. In the realm of the reasonable world, a contract was, of course, symbol of codified agreement aligned with legal structures which was a system for deal making, dispute settlement, and financial or service trading. In their world, a contract, always signed in blood and resting on the life-being of a third party witness, would and could only be broken if the upmost of animosities existed between signatory parties. A contract at the Genius Factory meant a blood pact and a sworn oath between souls. It was not a piece of paper but a stamp of loyalty between two people who were more than friends: they became family.  
  
There was only once, one single instance Seonghwa could remember, of a contract being broken. It was his and Hongjoong’s first year and they both to this day were still scarred from it. That was also the year the school, which had and always would be used as a loose application of the term, had stopped serving chocolate muffins in the dining hall. Both, on the whole, had been incredibly terrible happenings and grated on the psyche of every fourth year still left on the island.  
  
“Sannie…” he started.  
  
“Don’t you, ‘Sannie’ me,” he grumbled. “Leave me the fuck alone, asshole.” And then he was gone.  
  
Seonghwa was left standing there, alone, as the people began to continue on their way and the world moved on it way. Yeri shot him an apologetic glance as she passed by, letting the corners of her lips tug up in a mournful smile before she too wandered around the corner. Passing by an inconspicuous closet on the right side of the hall, the one directly across the hall from the vaulted stone windows which poured southern exposed light into the dark space and the same one which Minho and Jisung had been known to frequent on Wednesdays in between their classes, Yeri heard a rather curious thud. She glanced around her before slowly waltzing up to the door and placing her ear against it.  
  
“I’ll never talk!” a voice inside screamed.  
  
Yeri scrambled away quickly. There was no way she was going to be interviewed again about student torture practices on the grounds, or their insistence that she call it ‘enhanced interrogation’.  
  
‘How American,’ she thought, opening the staircase door.  
  
Inside the closet, was a whole other story.  
  
“I won’t tell you anything!” Wooyoung yelled again.  
  
Yunho leaned forward to punch Wooyoung across the face where he sat. The impact of his fist with the other’s cheekbone resounded in the hollow closet, a heavy thud of contact. Mingi grabbed his friend’s arm as he moved to continue the momentum of the swing back across the younger boy’s face.  
  
“I mean I can’t,” he said.  
  
“I have no idea what’s going on right now,” he continued at their silence.  
  
Yunho and Mingi, in all their professional interrogation demeanour, shared a visibly confused glance with each other before leaning forward.  
  
“But you were with San earlier?” Yunho mused.  
  
“Yeah! We saw you whispering together!” Mingi added with an accusatory finger. “Probably about the bet!”  
  
“He heard the best rumour about Yves.”  
  
“But you went off together afterwards!” Yunho pressed again.  
  
“Second year meeting,” Wooyoung shrugged. “Apparently someone cloned the keys to the incendiary research storage lockers and handed them out to all the first years in the course.”  
Yunho crossed his arms with a quirked eyebrow.  
  
Recognition flickered over Mingi’s eyes. “Did you-”  
  
“Bye guys!” Wooyoung yelled, immediately vaulting his lanky body from the chair and running for the door as his arms dropped an untied knot of rope from his back.  
  
“Was he-”  
  
“Let him go,” Yunho shook his head. “Let him go.”  



	8. The Crew

“Look what I found!” Wooyoung chirped, all but slamming his body into the study area in the basement of the weapons centre their small group of friends seemed to frequent.  
  
“Oh my god, you did not steal a kid,” grumbled a disembodied voice.  
  
Jongho looked up and saw a pair of legs thrown over the side of a beanbag chair, a torso disappearing into the enormous folds of the fabric. The pair of legs, clad in green and black tartan trousers, sat, shoe free with fuzzy white socks, resting against the stomach of a boy who seemed to be nursing an entire bottle of scotch straight from the bottle, a faint rosy blush on his cheeks. A head popped up from the mass of fabric, hair frazzled and messy.  
  
“San!” Wooyoung whined. “I didn’t. Seonghwa did,” he corrected the mop of sleepy hair.  
  
“And who is he?” San asked Wooyoung, pointedly ignoring Seonghwa. “Who are you?” he asked again narrowing her eyes into slices of deadly suspicion directly at Jongho this time.  
Wooyoung’s face lit up. “He’s our happy accident!”  
  
“Is that supposed to be endearing?” Mingi leaned over to San and whispered.  
  
“Relax,” Seonghwa mused, leaning on the wall by the others. “He’s just a first year.”  
  
“I’m surprised Wooyoung found anything,” someone said from the side and Jongho only now realized another boy was in the room, lounging on the floor with no less than three laptops strewn about him and a bottle of pills spilled onto the floor beside him haphazardly.  
  
Seonghwa nodded at the boy sprawled on the ground who nodded back silently and returned to his screens.  
  
“Yeah! Good job, Wooyoung!” the boy with the heavy buzz going smiled.  
  
“Mingi, we’re not supposed to encourage him,” the other boy in the room sighed.  
  
“And I found him!” Seonghwa called out annoyed.  
  
“Didn’t I find you?” Jongho asked.  
  
“I like him! Can we keep him?” Mingi yelled back before Seonghwa had the time to respond.  
  
“You can’t just keep a person,” San drawled, slumping his head back onto the bean bag bored.  
  
“But he’s a stray!” Wooyoung argued with a prominent pout on his lips. “He has nowhere else to go, San.”  
  
A hand raised into the air from the pile of limbs, waving dismissively. “Fine keep him. See if I care.”  
  
“San, can I-” Seonghwa started to ask.  
  
He snapped her head up so quickly Jongho thought he would get whiplash and glared at the elder so scarily, Jongho was sure Seonghwa would run for the shore screaming. But the other held his ground and returned the gaze.  
  
“I don’t want to talk to you right now,” he snapped, heaving his body out of the bean bag and storming out of the room, knocking Seonghwa’s shoulder as he passed him.  
  
"Wait, your shoes," Jongho protested quietly to the now empty doorway.  
  
Mingi gave Seonghwa a knowing look and gestured toward the door. Seonghwa sighed.  
  
“I should… yeah. Watch the kid for me?” he asked.  
  
Mingi nodded him off and gestured more aggressively toward the door, raining his eyebrow. Seonghwa glanced at Jongho for a moment before taking off after San. The door slammed shut behind him with a slam in the now silent room. Wooyoung had run over to jump on top of Mingi and the two were now wrestling. The boy on the floor continued to type away at his computer, before realizing two people had left the room and then his gaze fell on Jongho.  
  
“Sorry, who are you?” he asked.  
  
“I’m Jongho. I’m new.”  
  
“Hongjoong,” the boy replied. “Fourth year, cyber student.”  
  
Jongho said nothing more and the air between the two of them grew palpably awkward.  
  
“I can, uh, show you your dorm?” Hongjoong offered. “Do you know which building you got?”  
  
“I think it was Gregson?”  
  
“Grayson!” Mingi’s voice shouted from the wrestling match. “I live in Grayson! So do Hongjoong and Yunho! I can take you!”  
  
Said boy abruptly pushed Wooyoung’s body off him and jumped out of the chair before running over and grabbing Jongho’s wrist.  
  
“Wait, I wanna come,” Wooyoung sputtered, picking his body up off the floor.  
  
“Well,” Hongjoong shrugged. “Let’s go.”  
  
A short 4 or 5 minute walk later, Jongho wasn’t sure but he thought perhaps not having Wooyoung and Mingi throw snowballs every second might make it a bit quicker, they arrived at Grayson hall.  
  
“That’s Lindsay May,” Hongjoong said pointing at one of the portraits on the wall of the dorm lobby.  
  
It was rather cosy and warm inside the building, having just come in from the snow. A squat, carpeted staircase of a deep wood lead upstairs, the stairs lined with ten or so photo-realistic paintings of notable alumni who had, any amount of time going back 500 years, resided in said building. Jongho had been assigned, surprisingly and suspiciously, to the dorm Hongjoong, Yunho, and Mingi called home. The latter two being roommates, by the grace of an unforeseen force who undoubtedly wished to wreak chaos, and the former with a 3rd year called Minho who also majored in cyber warfare.  
  
“She’s the programmer who created the algorithm which almost started the next World War in 1983. She’s mute because Dr. Paxon cut off her tongue for speaking too much. Said she was annoying,” Hongjoong paused for a moment on the 5th stair, hand stilling on the railing. “Programmer’s don’t really need to talk though,” he thought aloud.  
  
“Wait what do you mean next?” Jongho asked.  
  
Mingi chirped up from being him. “That’s the goal,” he clarified excitedly. “That’s your thesis project before you graduate.”  
  
“And Lindsay had the best score of all time,” Wooyoung said awed.  
  
The younger boy was still on the ground floor, having sunk into the large sofa at the base of the stairs. He looked very at home lounging in the soft cushion and much like a child, weary from a day’s play. And then Jongho remembered how he met him in the first place.  
  
“Yeah, before Zuho, Changkyun, Ten, and Kun. Who would have thought twitter would have been so successful in fostering international animosity?” Hongjoong added.  
  
“Oh please that little pet project is just a facilitator. Lindsay actually did something. Nearly finished it too,” Mingi grumbled.  
  
Jongho was amazed… and confused. “Do you guys know what you’re going to do yet?”  
  
“Well, I’m an oligarch’s kid,” Mingi said. “So all I have to do is let nepotism take its hold and run for president of something and then fuck it up from there.”  
  
Jongho looked over at Hongjoong who had begun to ascend to the second floor once again.  
  
“I’m currently working on it,” he said not looking back at them.  
  
“I WANT TO DECIMATE EVERY BUILDING OF WORLD POWER!” a voice called up from below.  
  
Jongho and Mingi leaned over the railing to spot Wooyoung grinning widely on the couch staring up at them.  
  
“That’s a good one!” Mingi shouted back. “Just not my house!”  
  
“Well, I’ll make sure you’re not in it!”  
  
“Deal!”  
  
“And he can get away with that?” Jongho asked. “I mean none of you have ever been arrested?”  
  
“Who’s going to arrest us?” Hongjoong taunted just as Wooyoung called back, “Not Voluntarily!”  
  
“Who would ever voluntarily be arrested?” Hongjoong asked, now joining the other two peak over the railing, only from slightly higher up. The younger boys all stared up at him as he spoke, his shaggy hair falling into his eyes. “Doesn’t it have to be involuntary or something?”  
  
Wooyoung laughed. “You never know.”  
  
“What does that mean?” Jongho asked Hongjoong, craning his head upwards again from where his body was precariously balanced over the open space of the lofted lobby.  
  
“I have no idea,” he sighed, straightening his body and disappearing from Jongho’s view.  
  
“You coming?” he called out a second later and Mingi and Jongho followed.


	9. They're a Delicacy in France

“Don’t you think if once, just once, you acted normal that maybe you wouldn’t be struck here at the end of the day?”  
  
Wooyoung, turned to Seonghwa with wide innocent eyes, completely drenched in smouldering tar and littered with tiny burn scars, a horde of small, vibrantly orange frogs nipping at his heels.  
  
“No. Not really,” the boy answered honestly.  
  
“Do I even want to know?”  
  
“No. Not really,” Wooyoung said again.  
  
“What am I going to do with you?”  
  
Wooyoung shrugged, the motion of his arms faltering as they fell back down harder than they should have. Seonghwa glanced at him curiously. He opened his mouth to speak but a ringing sound cut him off. He pulled his cell phone of his sweater pocket, the soft cashmere tickling his hand.  
  
“Hongjoong?” he answered the caller, pausing as the boy on the other end rapidly threw out words.  
  
“Nah,” Seonghwa mused, looking over Wooyoung who was swaying unsteadily on his feet. “I got nothing important going on.”  
  
Wooyoung slowly slumped against the window, hand smearing down the glass pane with a black streak in its wake.  
  
“What did he do this time? You’re seriously going to make me wait? Fine; I’ll be over in a second.”  
  
The younger boy’s body finally crumpled to the floor in a soft thud that had Seonghwa eyeing him. ‘I’m on the phone,’ he mouthed to Wooyoung who was looking exponentially worse for wear.  
  
“Well… bye,” Seonghwa ended the call. He pocketed his phone and waved at the younger boy laying on the floor of the corridor. “Have fun with your frogs,” he said, waltzing away without a care in the world.  
  
Wooyoung’s eyes widened confused. “I have frogs?” he asked, head falling onto his left shoulder. “Where did I get frogs?” his voice softened in exhaustion.  
  
The cold hallways of the mechanics building, which was notorious for its horrid drafts that remained unfixed for at least a quarter of a century, gave way to the warm underground passage it shared with the computer science building.  
  
“Hey,” Juyeon stopped Seonghwa in the corridor outside the surveillance wing. “Did you hear some kid lost his project for Dr. Lee. Poor dude’s gonna die.”  
  
“He might,” the boy chuckled. “Depends what class it is…”  
  
“I heard it’s just a second year into class.”  
  
“Remember what happened to Lisa? Was she a second year when Dr. Lee got rid of her?”  
  
“Who’s Lisa?”  
  
“Exactly.”  
  
Juyeon laughed.  
  
“Hey, I’m late to the gym, but I’ll see you back at the dorm, alright? Dinner tonight, don’t forget.”  
  
“Yeah, yeah,” Seonghwa waved him off.  
  
“It’s taco night, dude! Get excited!” Juyeon yelled, backing away slowly.  
  
Seonghwa checked the hall for a brief moment before turning back to Juyeon and doing a little cheer with his hands which seemed to appease his roommate and the boy was on his way.  
  
“Heyo,” Seonghwa greeted, raining his hand in a mock salute as he entered the computer lab.  
  
Hongjoong was hunched over himself in front of a desktop, a laptop precariously balanced on his thighs. He was chewing his lip in thought, a display of satellites littering his screen.  
  
“Hongjoong?”  
  
The boy startled, almost dropping the machine from his lap, arm swatting across his desk frantically and narrowly missing a bottle of water.  
  
“Do NOT sneak up on me like that!”  
  
“You called me,” Seonghwa defended.  
  
“Right… I’m going to kill Mingi.”  
  
“I know. You said so on the phone. Is that it? Can I go now?” he motioned to the door.  
  
“What no! That’s why I called you. You’re the one that’s supposed to tell me not to murder the kids!”  
  
“Why would I care?”  
  
“Cause they’re your friends?”  
  
“I don’t have friends.”  
  
“Then what the hell am I?”  
  
“A patient acquaintance.”  
  
Hongjoong sneered. “Can’t pull a fast one on me, old man. I know you love us.”  
  
“I’m barely a year older than you,” Seonghwa whined.  
  
“Your soul is as old as time.”  
  
“Why am I even here?”  
  
“Because I don’t want to kill Mingi.”  
  
“I thought you said you wanted to kill him?”  
  
Hongjoong gave Seonghwa a look as if to say, ‘You’re well aware why you’re here’ and then proceeded to say as much in not so many words. “If I wanted Mingi dead, I would have called Yeosang.”  
  
“Oh my god, Yeosang! I promised him, I’d help him study for synthetic diseases!”  
  
“It’s not like he needs the practice,” Hongjoong grumbled.  
  
Seonghwa half-heartedly patted Hongjoong on the shoulder looking at his desktop. “I have to go. Good luck with your – uh, space things.” Seonghwa threw out, already ploughing out of the room.  
  
“Hey, I needed your help!”  
  
“No, you don’t. You’ll be fine!” he weaved through the desks and monitoring toward the door.  
  
“I’ll kill him!”  
  
“Sure you will!” he shouted back as the door slammed closed and Hongjoong was plunging into the silent darkness that marked most of his days.  
  
“You’re late!” Yeosang had yelled once Seonghwa made it to the basement of the building.  
  
He sat curled up in a window bench, papers scattered about and vials of liquid scattered on the stone ledge next to him. One vial was ticked on end and oozing a smocking green substance onto the carpet. The growing singed hole seemed of no particular interest to him and so Seonghwa dismissed it.  
  
“Have they fixed your laptop yet?” he asked, sitting down on the end of the bench.  
  
“No,” Yeosang pouted. “I shouldn’t have pissed off Hongjoong’s roommate last weekend. I’ll never get my essay for synth dis in on time.”  
  
“Hey, that’s what I’m here for right.”  
  
His phone beeped and looked down for a second to text back a quick reply.  
  
"I thought we were studying," Yeosang pestered, leaning over to look at Seonghwa's screen.  
  
"It's just Hongjoong. He promised he'd feed the kid."  
  
"What kid?"  
  
"Jongho. You met him the other day. First Year. "  
  
“Oh, you big softy, picking up strays.”  
  
“If you tell anyone, I’ll murder you.”  
  
Yeosang merely smiled back at him with a warm and fuzzy and uniquely Yeosang smile.  
  
“So how’s Yunho?” he asked the younger.  
  
“He’s good.”  
  
Seonghwa raised his eyebrow. “Just good?”  
  
“Yeah, what about him?”  
  
“Oh, nothing. Never mind. So… communicable. We talking blood, lungs, or ingestion?”  
  
Once the clock has reached a perfect sectioning of the lower left quadrant, Yeosang yawned and pushed his book shut.  
  
“I want dinner now. Can we take a break?”  
  
Before Seonghwa could respond, which should have almost certainly consisted of a sudden realization that he had in fact forgotten about dinner despite hours before running into his roommate who explicitly told him not to, Hongjoong's roommate ran inside. The fourth year was frantically diving under tables and scanning the floor like a man dying for water in the hottest desert. He darted up to Seonghwa and Yeosang where they sat.  
  
“Have either of you seen Ji’s frogs?!” Minho yelled at them, clearly distraught.  
  
Yeosang shook his head.  
  
“No,” Seonghwa replied, leafing through his notes. “Where would I have seen frogs?”  
  
“That’s what I’m asking!” the other boy seethed.  
  
Neither of them responded.  
  
“They’re extremely poisonous!” Minho pestered. “And he really needs them back for his project.”  
  
Seonghwa put his book down slowly and then turned to face Minho. “You said they’re poisonous?”  
  
“Super,” the boy nodded enthusiastically.  
  
Seonghwa said nothing in response but nodded his head once in understanding as he stood up from his seat.  
  
“You’re going to help me?” Minho seemed confused.  
  
“I just realized I have somewhere I need to be,” Seonghwa calmly explained.  
  
Yeosang pouted, reaching out towards the elder. “Wait you were-”  
  
But Seonghwa was already gone, hurriedly walking around the corner and leaving all his things behind.  
  
His shoes clacked against the floor in a beat like a war drum as he sprinted through the tunnel back toward the mechanics department. The passage was empty and one of the lights, broken, flickered incessantly in his face as he stormed by the amber pulse.  
  
“WOOYOUNG?!” Seonghwa screamed, running into Wooyoung on his way to where he had last seen the other.  
  
He nearly knocked the boy over, steadying him at the last second with a vice like grip on both the younger’s arms.  
  
“Woah. Where are you headed?”  
  
“HOW ARE YOU OKAY?!” Seonghwa’s voice bellowed through the corridor.  
  
“Awwwn, you were worried about me?” Wooyoung teased.  
  
“THE FROGS!?”  
  
“Yeah, those guys were real weird. I have no idea where they came from,” he laughed.  
  
“HOW ARE YOU NOT DEAD RIGHT NOW?”  
  
“Oh, that’d be me,” a voice behind them said.  
  
Yeosang stood there panting holding Seonghwa’s backpack off his shoulder, the papers almost spilling out of the half done zipper.  
  
“Man, you can run fast.”  
  
“Yeosang!” Seonghwa yelled. “THE FROGS!”  
  
“Just- Just give me a second,” Yeosang huffed, leaning over to rest his hands on his knees. “Seriously though, did you do track in high school or something?”  
  
Seonghwa continued to stare at him, seeped in vexation and impatience, still clutching his friend in front of him as he letting go would cause the other to disappear right then and there.  
  
“Those pills I made him have a shit ton of antidotes laced in them. I figured it’d be useful,” he clarified.  
  
“You have the foresight of a god,” Seonghwa breathed out astonished.  
  
“Nah, the sick bay is just tired of me sending in half their weekly patients,” he snickered


	10. Rude Awakenings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'll fix the formatting in a bit. Sorry to whoever is actually reading this (if that's anyone at all)

Jongho and Hongjoong, went to fetch Yeosang for breakfast. Well, Jongho offered and dragged Hongjoong with him, who followed at a distance engrossed in the book he was reading narrowly avoiding every wall as they wandered through the campus. He knocked softly on the door, hearing a grunt from inside, and entered. The lights were still off, at 8:30 in the morning, and San’s bed sat vacant, the blankets neatly folded back into place. Yeosang laid under his covers beneath the window’s streaming rays. At least, Jongho assumed it the large lump of groaning mass was Yeosang.  
  
“Get up, loser,” Hongjoong threw at the pile of sheets.  
  
“Why?” the bed mumbled back.  
  
“Because I said so.”  
  
“… fine.”  
  
“Is that a femur?” Jongho asked in disbelief at the object which tumbled out from the blanket as Yeosang got out of bed.  
  
“Mmmmm,” he hummed in response rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Got it half off,” he mumbled with a yawn.  
  
“I don’t know if I’m more or less scared that you bought it…” Jongho said.  
  
He looked up confused with a tilt of his head, eyes still fluttering the sleep away from them. “What did you think I grew it in a jar?” he chuckled.  
  
“No. That’s not what I thought at all. Who even-”  
  
“What I’m a doctor?” he responded, pulling on dark green trousers over his sleep shorts, the fabric bunching horribly but fitting, nonetheless.  
  
Hongjoong looked up from his book. “Excuse me what?”  
  
“Yeah, I went to medical school, losers,” Yeosang said nonchalantly styling his hair in front of the mirror.  
  
“Really?” asked Jongho just as Hongjoong asked, “Are you sure?”  
  
He looked at them in the glass. “Wasn’t verified but that doesn’t matter.”  
  
“Yeah it kind of does,” said Hongjoong.  
  
“Oh pish posh. No it doesn’t, silly.”  
  
“How would you know?” Jongho asked.  
  
“I’m a doctor,” Yeosang quipped in response with a wink.  
  
“No you’re not!” Hongjoong yelled back.  
  
Once he had dressed - and a whole ordeal involving making the bed, Hongjoong yelled at Yeosang incessantly, and Jongho’s discomfort at learning exactly what some of Yeosang’s substances did to a human body- they were on their way to breakfast. Well, Hongjoong may or may not have been kidnapped by a girl who insisted she was his friend but whom Hongjoong absolutely did not want to follow. She swore up and down she needed the elder for a project and Yeosang had simply let her walk off with the other boy.  
  
“Pick your poison,” Yeosang winked setting down some drinks on the table.  
  
“You know I hate it when you do that!” Yunho exploded. “It was one time! One time!”  
  
“Learn to read dipshit.”  
  
“WHY ON EARTH WOULD ANYONE HAVE BERYLLIUM ROOT EXTRACT IN A WATER BOTTLE?!?” Yunho yelled.  
  
“I had it labelled!” Yeosang defended.  
  
“And with your other normal water bottles!”  
  
“Why are you stealing my water in the first place?” Yeosang asked crossing his arms.  
  
Amidst the yelling and the grumbling and the tense looks the two were shooting each other, San and Seonghwa talking quietly in the corner, and Wooyoung fuddling silently, Jongho walked up. Sitting down, he immediately noticed an odd book on table, full of runes and diagrams illustrated in foreign words. Wooyoung seemed to be immersed in it as he drank his coffee, gaze not leaving the page, the secrets of its content floating into his eyes and swirling about in a head holding thoughts as elusive as they were impressive.  
  
“I heard this crazy rumour that Madame P’s synthetic Molybdenum can make people telekinetic” Jongho rambled awkwardly, trying to make conversation as he wedged his body between Yeosang and Yunho, earning a scary look from San which had him withering. Yunho was distracted by Wooyoung at the moment, helping the younger through some basic German.  
  
“Oh that doesn’t work,” Yeosang answered.  
  
“How would you know?” San asked, leaving Jongho to sigh in relief at the absence of the other’s gaze.  
  
“Cause Yunho didn’t –“ Yeosang paused in realization looking at Jongho’s wide eyes.  
  
“What did I do?” Yunho asked suddenly, causing them to jump.  
  
“Ha! Haha,” Yeosang laughed nervously. “Nothing?”  
  
“Why was that a question?” he asked.  
  
“No reason! I … have to go now. Yup, the lab’s calling.”  
  
“What’s up with him?” Yunho asked sipping his coffee.  
  
Jongho turned back to the table from where he had been tracking Yeosang as she left. “He’s literally crazy,” he mused.  
  
“You have no idea,” Yunho responded.  
  
“No,” Jongho corrected, “You have no idea.”  
  
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Chernobyl recently,” San said to Seonghwa, but at the sudden quietness which had sat down after Yeosang left, Jongho heard it loud and clear.  
  
Right then and there, it was cemented. Jongho was terrified of this guy.  
  
“1996,” Seonghwa replied.  
  
“Really?” interrupted Wooyoung seemingly shocked, looking up from his book and over at the two with rapt attention.  
  
“Yeah, I think it only got a B though,” Seonghwa added. “Maybe a B minus.”  
  
“Since you’re all begging at my feet for me to share my intellect with you, I’m planning on causing and financing every war for the next 50 years,” Yunho interrupted.  
  
“No one cares,” Wooyoung answered habitually.  
  
“I do!” Yeosang smiled.  
  
“I thought we were fighting?” Yunho asked him.  
  
“Oh right,” he said. “Yeah! No one cares.”  
  
“What does San do?” Jongho asked Yunho, leaning over to where the older boy sat pouting.  
  
“He gets hired out to give people interesting last words before they’re killed. He’s like a death penalty poet,” Yunho told him.  
  
The boy in question smiled widely at him. “Ha! Last week, I told this dude to say ‘I’m hungry’ in Latin and he bought it. laughed my ass off afterwards.”  
  
“What exactly do you mean by hired? Do you get paid to do it?”  
  
“Nah, but sometimes I can make them say the weirdest stuff and people will be scared shitless for weeks. It’s just… good exposure.”  
  
“He was Professor Mijiu’s intern last summer,” Yunho explained.  
  
“Best one ever!” he chirped with a grin that chilled Jongho right down to his core.  
  
“I thought she said to not ever let you back into her office ever again,” Wooyoung joked.  
  
San reached into his bag with a grimace. Everyone at the table immediately tensed and Yunho pulled out a knife from god knows where. Jongho’s eyes widened comically at the display, looking down at Yunho’s pants with horrified awe and then back at the blade with now rested on the surface of their breakfast table. San huffed at the scene and pulled out a notebook. Everyone visibly relaxed.  
  
“One too many times,” Seonghwa sighed.  
  
The table quieted again and Jongho, having known the others for barely a week pipped up at the silent discomfort. “Hey Wooyoung, what’s your book about?”  
  
The other looked up excitedly. “I’ve gotten super into black magic recently!”  
  
Everyone else at the table groaned in a knowing response.  
  
“Not again,” Yunho drawled.  
  
“Worry not, dear friends. That transcript happened to be South American. This,” he said holding up his book like a trophy, “is German.”  
  
“You know German?” Jongho asked.  
  
“Ha!” Wooyoung responded going back to his reading.  
  
Once Yunho had explained to ins and outs of into to hacking to Jongho and the better part of the dining hall had packed itself up, Wooyoung unceremoniously ripped a jagged page from his beautiful book and slammed it onto the table. This cause Seonghwa to jolt in his seat, spilling tea all over his hand and smacking the back of Wooyoung’s head because of it.  
  
“Before you say no-” Wooyoung started.  
  
Seonghwa looked him dead in the eye as he interrupted, “No.”  
  
“I didn’t even get to ask this time!”  
  
“Funny thing: my answer is still no.”  
  
“But I found this super cool spell that I’m like 63% sure I can read. You never let me do anything fun!” Wooyoung whined.  
  
“Yeah, you never let him do anything fun!” Yunho parroted.  
  
“I don’t let him burn down the dorms,” Seonghwa responded bored.  
  
“You don’t even let him burn down the dorms?” San asked equally confused and offended as Wooyoung.  
  
“It’s inconveniencing and idiotic. We affect the world in more strategic and intelligent ways.”  
  
“But… fire,” Wooyoung pouted.  
  
“He makes quite a convincing argument,” San joined in with the puppy eyes.  
  
Seonghwa, clearly beyond exasperated as was his usual state, looked to Yunho to help.  
  
“Hey, I’m not the dad,” Yunho defended, holding his hand up in mock submission.  
  
“Neither am I!”  
  
“Sure,” Yunho mocked. “… dad,” he added with a snicker.


	11. What Happens in the Rain

Yunho laid across his bed, spine slumped over the edge and hanging upside down. His fluffy hair swung slightly as he swayed his head back and forth. Mingi sat at his desk, scribbling quietly away in an old frayed notebook.  
  
“And he’s so smart and happy and talented and pretty,” Yunho sighed heavily. “And I don’t even know what to do anymore.”  
  
“Why don’t you tell him?”  
  
“I don’t know. It’s weird. We’ve been friends for so long. What if he doesn’t like me? He’s so amazing and I’m just… me.”  
  
“Ah, so it is like he is the Vityaz-SN and you are the Bizon?” Mingi added like a matter of fact.  
  
“I don’t even know what that means but sure.”  
  
Mingi walked over, putting a hand on his shoulder in solidarity, and looking at him as if they shared a secret, which of course they did many but none even remotely relevant to their current topic of discussion. “You know,” he nodded with a smile.  
  
“Dude, I need actual good advice right now.”  
  
Mingi tilted his head in confusion, drawing his eyebrows together. “But you never listen to me.”  
  
Yunho levelled him with a look and sat up, crumpling his body onto the bed with a pout. “Did you know Yeosang once asked me what my favourite colour was… and then he said I was wrong.”  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“That’s not the point!” Yunho huffed, glaring at Mingi. “It’s blue,” he added as an afterthought. “But anyways, what the hell am I supposed to do?”  
  
“Not be an idiot?”  
  
“Mingi, you are not helping right now! I should have gone to San.”  
  
“San is terrible at keeping secrets from Yeosang,” Mingi laughed.  
  
“Fine I’ll go to Seonghwa.”  
  
“He doesn’t give a shit.”  
  
“Ugh. Why am I friends with any of you? My poor heart…”  
  
“Honestly, you can crash entire country’s economic grids, you’ve halted the global financial market for a good 47 hours, and you once caused a fucking earthquake, and yet you can’t talk to Yeosang about your feelings.”  
  
“The very idea of it is terrifying,” Yunho levelly responded.  
  
And speak of the devil. On his way to grab books for the library after his hacking office hours, Yunho halted in the middle of the hallway. It was the apocalypse had started: the world had ended. He stopped so immediately, Lucas ran into his back, stumbling a bit. The other boy gave him an odd look before following the sight that had entrapped Yunho.  
  
Yeosang was standing outside his locker looking like a kicked kitten.  
  
“Yuuunhooo,” Yeosang quietly whined once his gaze latched onto Yunho's. “Come watch a movie with me.”  
  
“Yeosang, I have to study.”  
  
“For whaaaat?” he complained draping himself over Yunho’s shoulders.  
  
“Environment.”  
  
“Yunho, you don’t even need to study environmental infrastructure. Let the earth die on its own time. It’ll happen eventually.”  
  
“Who do you think talked the US into dipping out on the Paris Climate Agreement?”  
  
“That was you?!” he asked awed.  
  
“Lol no. Your face,” he laughed. “But seriously I need to study.”  
  
“But, but I want cuddles,” Yeosang pouted up at him and the day Jung Yunho became immune to the pout of Kang Yeosang was the hell froze over, which coincidently was a 10 time failed dissertation topic.  
  
“Did something happen today?” he asked once they had settled in the dusty couches of the chemistry longue.  
  
No one used the room for her of deadly chemical leakage, but Yeosang assure him, both the past incidents had been Renjun’s fault and the boy was much more responsible now. It was nice, the dark green walls comfy around them, cradling the two in a quiet still space, rain pattering softly against the windows in faint tapping noise. The dark blue light of the sky flowed in and cast over them like an ocean wave. Yeosang tucked himself further into the boy’s chest, tightening his arms around the taller’s middle. The movie continued faintly in the background.  
  
“Someone made fun of my project in chemistry today.”  
  
Yunho looked down to see the other’s face in a full pout. “Just poison them,” he said.  
  
Yeosang pouted deeper.  
  
“Want me to poison them?” he asked.  
  
“No… I’ll do it,” he sighed. “Just- just later okay?”  
  
“Okay, Sangie.”  
  
They continued to watch the movie, an old vampire film that Yeosang loved and only watched on particularly sad days. Yunho blew off his environmental infrastructure research and happily snuggled Yeosang all afternoon.  
  
“I think I wanna live in an old castle too,” Yeosang said sometime later, sleepily burrowing into Yunho’s chest.  
  
“Pfft,” Yunho laughed softly. “You just want a dungeon.”  
  
“No!” he scoffed, sitting up a bit to look at him. “The- The wood!” he defended “The architecture! All the tapestries!”  
  
“Just day it Yeosang.”  
  
“… Okay, I want a dungeon,” he mumbled, settling back down against Yunho.  
  
And perhaps these small genius and masterminds and rebels had their days too, when the rain felt colder, and words stung deeper and the hug of a very special friend was enough to make it all go away.  
  
“Have you seen Yeosang?” Seonghwa asked Jongho, having seen the younger boy helplessly wandering outside near the stone arches of the quad next to the medical labs.  
  
“Hi, Seonghwa,” the small boy smiled. “Is he the scary one?” Jongho shivered, glancing around himself.  
  
“No, that’s San.”  
  
“Oh, then no.”  
  
“I haven’t seen him all afternoon.”  
  
Jongho shrugged.  
  
“Hey, what are you doing here anyways?” Seonghwa asked.  
  
“Oh, I was looking for-”  
  
“Jongho! My Friend! Hello! How are you?” an entirely too cheerful voice chirped.  
  
Jongho and Seonghwa looked across the quad, under the arch of the stone passage and towards the open green space in the middle. The rain heavily poured down on the small boy where he stood, absolutely drenched, and walking toward them.  
  
“Hold on,” said Seonghwa grabbing onto Wooyoung’s arm once the other had arrived at them. “Why are you bleeding?”  
  
“Sciencccce,” Wooyoung mused extracting his arm and winking playfully.  
  
“You’re so irresponsible,” Seonghwa huffed, pulling a hand of crumbled band aids out of his pocket and handing them to Wooyoung.  
  
Wooyoung stuffed them into his pocket with a smile.  
  
“I’m responsible! I can curb my impulses!”  
  
Seonghwa scoffed.  
  
“Hey! At any given point, I want to detonate the 500 bombs I have buried on campus, but do you see any fire?! No! Because I’m an adult!” Wooyoung proudly boasted.  
  
“You have what now?” Seonghwa asked slowly.  
  
“500…” Wooyoung began to say before he processed what exactly he had just told them and sprinted away.  
  
“Wooyoung!” Seonghwa screamed, propelling himself after the boy.  
  
The younger whipped his head around and saw the elder chasing after him. He quickly looked around and then ran, full speed through the outdoor corridor. Wooyoung reached the door, flinging it open and throwing his body up the stairs, Seonghwa hot on his heels. Jongho stumbled after them, confused and concerned. Wooyoung screeched gleefully as he lumbered up the staircase, Seonghwa, stony expression etched on his face, sprinted after the younger.  
  
Wooyoung suddenly dipped through a door and into an interior hallway of the building, Seonghwa tracking the piles of water which dripped on the floor. Wooyoung made eye contact with the elder as they stood, squaring off in the hall. He looked like a cornered feral animal and perhaps he was. Jongho flew through the doorway just in time to notice an odd twinkle in the second year’s eyes, Seonghwa standing in front of him panting.  
  
Wooyoung ran directly at the window. He grabbed a small orange tool from his backpack’s side and held it up, pushing it against the pane. The glass immediately shattered alerting the kids around him. Wooyoung ducked his head into his blazer and threw his body out the window just as Seonghwa reached the sill. The elder stood there a moment, looking down at the smashed window and the absence of the younger boy. The funny thing was that Jongho was about 90% sure they were on the second story.  
  
After a deeply irritated sigh emitted from his chest, Seonghwa simply swivelled on his heel and walked down the stairs, leaving a worried Jongho to trail after him.  
  
“Is he okay?”  
  
“No,” Seonghwa responded monotonously.  
  
“Aren’t you going to check on him?”  
  
“Don’t know, don’t care,” the boy mused. “Honestly, I’m surprised he hasn’t blown up half the school yet.”  
  
“Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?” Jongho asked.  
  
Seonghwa stopped walking for a moment to eye him. “You’re learning,” he smiled and then continued on his way.  
  
“Does this happen often?”  
  
“Wooyoung being a dumbass, me wanting to kill him, or someone jumping out a window?”  
  
“Ummm,” Jongho mused, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “Any of them really. All of them.”  
  
“Well, Wooyoung is always a dumbass, I always want to kill him, and I think at least once a month. What were you looking for again?”  
  
“I can’t say I remember,” said Jongho.  
  
“Well then,” Seonghwa nodded like he had accomplished something. “I’m off. Don’t die.” And he was gone.


	12. All the Answers, All the Questions

“I won. I won. I won. I won,” San taunted.  
  
Yunho stood there with his arms crossed, a sour expression on his face. “No, you didn’t!”  
  
“Pay up,” San chirped extending her hand toward him.  
  
“Wooyoung killed him!”  
  
“Well, we made a blood pact so ha!” San giggled, sticking his tongue out at the other.  
  
“What is happening?” Mingi asked, as he came down the staircase to meet Yunho in the lobby of their dorm.  
  
“I won!” San yelled, throwing his hands in the air in victory.  
  
“Wooyoung blasted the professor and now San is claiming he won because they made a stupid blood pact,” Yunho grumbled.  
  
“Oh,” Mingi muttered. “Too bad for us,” he shrugged.  
  
Yunho flung his hands about his head. “How do we even know if they made a blood pact?!”  
  
“They’re practically married anyways,” Mingi responded calmly. “Seems plausible.”  
  
“We’re not married,” San screeched. “We’re blood buddies! That isn’t even the point. I won the bet!”  
  
“Come to think of it, if someone told me they were married, I’d totally believe it,” Yunho said.  
  
San glared over at the boys’ pensive expressions.  
  
“Isn’t a blood pact like a demonic version of marriage? I mean when you think about it, logistically-”  
  
San slapped Mingi on the arm with the full force of his body behind it, effectively shutting the boy up.  
  
“Oh my god, is that why Wooyoung was reading about Black Magic the other day?” Yunho excitedly clapped. “You’re getting satanically married! Why didn’t you tell me?! I thought we were friends?! Can I be the maid of honour?!”  
  
“No,” Mingi rolled his eyes. “Obviously, I’d look much better in a dress.”  
  
“WOOYOUNG AND I ARE NOT GETTING MARRIED BY THE DEVIL!” San screamed at the top of his lungs.  
  
The door behind them slammed shut in the silence which followed. Yunho and Mingi stared with wide eyes behind San. He slowly turned around and halted once he saw what exactly had caught their attention.  
  
Jungwoo stood there with wide eyes, mouth agape and hands tightly clutching a book in front of his chest.  
  
“I’m just gonna-“ Jungwoo gestured vaguely toward the door. “I’m just gonna go.”  
  
“No! It’s-”  
  
“Invite me to your wedding, yeah?” he smiled awkwardly and slipped out.  
  
“Oh my god!” San sneered, turning around to the glare at Yunho and Mingi who were attempting, and failing, to hold the laughs which were bubbling up in their chests. “First Seonghwa and now you two! He’s never going to talk to me again.”  
  
“Hey, he wanted to come to your wedding. So that’s good…” Mingi tried to point out only to be hit by the large binder San lobbed at his head.  
  
“But I’m the maid of honour, right?” Yunho smirked.  
  
“The only ceremony you two are going to is a goddamn funeral.”  
  
“Will there be flowers?”  
  
This time the flying object hit Yunho square in the forehead. He looked over at Mingi.  
  
“I think it’s time to take our leave,” he nodded at his friend, slowly getting up and creeping around a fuming San.  
  
“You better run,” San screamed after them.  
  
Yein popped her head through the door a second later, shaking snow from her head. It feel like an angelic rain from her ponytail onto the carpet of the entryway.  
  
“I thought I heard you!” she beamed at San. “Wanna go see Mijiu?”  
  
“No, I’m not in the mood.”  
  
Yein raised her eyebrow. “Wanna talk about it?”  
  
San didn’t respond.  
  
“Wanna go spar?” Yein tried again.  
  
“Yeah,” San smiled. “That’d be nice.”  
  
They trudged through the snow flurry which had only gotten stronger in the weeks since the winter semester had started. The cold bit like sharp little fangs every time they stepped outside, bundling against the torment with millions of yards of scarves. Someone should really dig out the old weapons tunnels, but of course everyone was afraid of radiation as if they weren’t already exposed to a healthy dosage on any normal day.  
  
In the very same soft misting of snow, Hongjoong finally reached the large impending doors to the mechanics and machinery building. Yanking the heavy wood open, he stepped inside and shrugged his jacket and hat off, hanging the frozen garments on the hook beside two other coats, dripping snow off them. He hummed in thought and pulled out his phone before nodding with a huff.  
  
Hongjoong laboured up the stairs to the surveillance corridor and into the computer lab; dark circles so thick under his eyes they seemed to be inset. He sipped a large mug of lukewarm black coffee, and padding slowly to his desk, not bothering to flick the lights on. There were no other fourth years in the morning which wasn’t that large of a surprise considering the entire department worked better between the hours of 10 pm and 5 am on a daily basis. Hongjoong was working on his sleep schedule after being chastised by Seonghwa.  
  
He started booting up his monitors before his phone rang.  
  
“I’m up, Seonghwa!” he shouted into the receiver before stopping to listen. “Oh, sorry San…” he responded, placing his coffee on the table and dumping his body into his chair.  
  
The wheels creaked and swivelled the chair in a small curve.  
  
“No, no I haven’t seen the boys. Why are you… oh, oh really.” Hongjoong hummed. “I’ll let you know. Tell Yein I say hi, though!”  
  
He put the phone down and then pushed his chair back the table slightly, looking down with an unamused expression. Mingi and Yunho, despite their larger taller statures, sat crammed under the desk, limbs pretzeled and knotted together in a rather comedic scene.  
  
“What did you do?” Hongjoong asked them, unsurprised at both their presence and the knowledge that they did indeed piss San off very thoroughly.  
  
Mingi sputtered. “How did you-”  
  
“I have cameras, you idiots,” Hongjoong drawled. “Now what did you do?”  
  
“Nothing, I swear!” Mingi pipped up.  
  
“We were, somehow, more stupid than usual today,” Yunho answered the other.  
  
“How is that possible?”  
  
“Honestly? I don’t know. I amaze myself sometimes.”  
  
“We are pretty amazing,” Mingi snickered.  
  
Hongjoong crossed his arms, sitting sit above them in his desk chair and looking down at the pile of boy in front of him. “And are you planning to sit here all day because I have work.”  
  
“But San is scary,” Mingi frowned.  
  
“Yeah please don’t make us leave,” Yunho added with puppy eyes.  
  
Hongjoong huffed, pulling his chair in. “Fine, but if you make a sound, I have free licence to kick the shit out of you.”  
  
“Fair enough,” Mingi mumbled, settling down to nap.  
  
“Oh yeah, and you probably shouldn’t have left your jackets downstairs,” Hongjoong added after a moment.  
  
Yunho cursed, rocketing up from under the desk and pulling Mingi with him. “He’s gonna find us!”  
  
“Bye,” Hongjoong waved them off, finally turning to his monitor and opening his satellite software.  
  
The snow continued to drift by the windows, whistling by the glass panes like tiny feathered dancers, summersaulting around the sky. There’s a rather remarkable thing about snow, about the little flurries which blunder by while feet keep marching and laughing keep drifting on after. The snow, and the joyful stillness that rolled on next to it, it kept bodies tucked inside under covers and warm blankets of comfort. Well, that was exactly where Jongho would have loved, more than anything else in the world, to be. However, someone had a different idea.  
  
“Exactly who is Mingi’s dad?” Jongho asked as he and Yeosang studied in the back of the library.  
  
The two chairs and the small table they used were tucked between the ends of two massive stone pillars sitting against the tall bookshelves. It was a nice little crevice where they had been squeezed for hours. Yeosang had come to Jongho’s room that Saturday morning and before the younger knew what was going on, he had been commandeered. It quite reminded him of the way he met Seonghwa.  
  
“He’s an oligarch,” Yeosang replied, rearranging his legs under himself.  
  
“Well yeah, but what does he do?”  
  
Yeosang looked up and blinked blankly before facing him. “You know, I don’t really know.” He narrowed her eyes. “Why?”  
  
“I’m just… curious.”  
  
“Better be careful about that,” Yeosang warned.  
  
“That’s what Seonghwa says,” Jongho mumbled. “But really,” he spoke up, “Mingi makes it sound like his dad is God or something.”  
  
Yeosang laughed dryly. “Mingi’s dad has more money than god,”  
  
“It’s true. I’ve met him,” added Wooyoung from where he lay on the floor fidgeting with small metal gears.  
  
They tuned to him as he randomly spoke up for the first time in the time they had been studying, previously dotting on his machine in silence, the occasional hum to remind them of his presence. Jongho had forgotten the other was there at all. Come to think of it, Wooyoung had been there before them, so engrossed he didn’t even greet them when they stumbled in sleepily. To be quite honest, only Jongho was really tired, further exhausted by the uncharacteristic energy of the other.  
  
“You’ve met Mingi’s dad?” Yeosang asked surprised.  
  
“No,” Wooyoung furrowed his brow confusion. “God,” he corrected before getting up and wandering away, arms filled with discombobulated mechanical parts.  
  
“Who the hell is he?” Jongho breathed out.  
  
“I don’t really know that either,” Yeosang answered turning back to his notebook, unfazed.  
  
“Yeosang?”  
  
“No, I don’t know how Wooyoung got into school here, and yes he is as smart as people say he is.”  
  
“No, I wanted to ask if you knew Seonghwa’s full name. I was trying to look him up in the-”  
  
“That, my friend,” he sighed, “is a more precious secret than any other.”


	13. Family Matters

Wooyoung ran into the lounge of Yeosang and San’s dorm, ripping earbuds from his head, which looked rather painful to Jongho, and physically vibrantly - with what they did not know. Once the cause had been literal motor oil and caffeine which he claimed were ‘accidentally’ injected into his blood stream by a classmate. Hongjoong had his bets on Jaemin, but San swore it was Lia. ‘Why can’t women poison people?’ he had argued, and Hongjoong had perplexedly acquiesced. Another time it had be an ‘experimental’ conduction system, but that basically meant the explosions engineer had wanted to electrocute himself and needed a fancy excuse to justify it. Wooyoung had been fine but his hair had never quite recovered.  
  
“We need a name,” the 2nd year said suddenly.  
  
Hongjoong rolled his eyes. “No. No we absolutely do not.”  
  
“What for?” Jongho asked.  
  
“Cause we’re such good friends,” he smiled innocently.  
  
Seonghwa looked up from his lap and the papers laid in it and at the boy with an incredibly unentertained face.  
  
“But what if-” Wooyoung began.  
  
“No,” Hongjoong and Seonghwa chorused, the former with more of a fearful inflection than the latter who simply sounded exhausted.  
  
Yunho sighed from beside him on the couch, adjusting Yeosang’s head from where the other slept on his shoulder. “That’s the worst idea you’ve ever had.”  
  
“No, I’m pretty sure the worst idea was –“ San started to say before Hongjoong interrupted him.  
  
“Second semester. Last Year. Dynamite.”  
  
Yunho and Mingi both nodded their heads in remembrance.  
  
“Oh yeah…” Mingi breathed out. “I remember that.”  
  
“What happened last year?” Jongho asked with equal amounts reservation and apprehension.  
  
“Can’t say,” Hongjoong answered. “We had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.”  
  
“They do that here?”  
  
“Yeah, Mingi and I are trying to see who can rack up more incident reports from the school and I have like…” Yunho paused for a moment counting on his hands, “at least 17 non-disclosures.”  
  
“I’m gonna win!” Mingi taunted slapping Yunho’s arm.  
  
Yeosang shifted in his sleep at the disturbance.  
  
Yunho narrowed his eyes. “If you wake him, I swear to god you’ll lose a finger.”  
  
“Whatever, I’ll just get someone to make me a prosthetic.”  
  
“Ask Wooyoung,” Seonghwa droned from his chair. “He’ll probably give you sepsis but at least he’ll do it for free.”  
  
Jongho sat there puzzled for a moment. “Don’t you think Wooyoung would be more likely to win?”  
  
“Hmmm?” asked Yunho.  
  
“Your bet. Don’t you think he’d have more incident reports?”  
  
“Mine don’t count!” Wooyoung chirped.  
  
“Yeah, it wouldn’t be fair,” Mingi explained.  
  
Yunho chuckled fondly. “They had to make a separate office just to store his. Wooyoung’s on a whole different level.”  
  
The younger boy beamed with pride, skipping off to where Seonghwa sat and positioning himself at the elder’s feet.  
  
“If you distract me, I swear to god you’re getting waterboarded again,” Seonghwa gritted out, staring the younger down with intense eyes that had Jongho quaking but seemed to have no effect whatsoever on Wooyoung.  
  
He merely nodded in understanding and re-inserted his ear buds, which Jongho noticed were connected to a Walkman, and tucked his legs up to his chest. The boy pulled out a notepad and began scribbling away and drawing sketches.  
  
“How is he still at school then?” Jongho asked once he heard the steady guitar from the other’s direction.  
  
“I ask myself that every goddamn day,” Seonghwa sighed, looking down at Wooyoung with the same energy of a new parent.  
  
“I think his family might have some power on the board,” Hongjoong mused.  
  
“Yeah, I see him talking to the principal all the time and that woman has, surprisingly, not killed him yet,” San added.  
  
“What does that mean?” Jongho asked them but it was Seonghwa who jumped in and answered.  
  
“I knew him for half a week before I tried to kill him. Trust me, she would have done it by now.”  
  
“I feel like everyone either is in love with him, wants to kill him, or is utterly terrified,” San said, counting off the three options on his fingers.  
  
Hongjoong raised his eyebrow expectantly. “Are you saying you’re in love with him?”  
  
“No!” he sputtered. “I tolerate him!”  
  
“That wasn’t an option,” Mingi teased him with a smirk.  
  
“I had a crush on someone once,” Yunho pipped up. “I don’t like emotions so I just burned everything they ever gave me.”  
  
“That’s funny,” a voice softly interjected and Yunho tensed looking down to find Yeosang awake.  
  
“It reminds me of that one time you lost the hat I gave you from my Grand Canyon trip!” Yeosang giggled.  
  
“Oh yeah,” Yunho replied. “Freak fire.”  
  
“Seems legit,” he shrugged. “I can just get you a new you if you want,” he smiled.  
  
Yunho, quite obviously, blushed to his core. “Y-yeah. I’d like that a lot, Sangie,” he responded staring after the other like a lovesick puppy, which of course, he was.  
  
“Wait, Wooyoung,” Jongho interrupted, yelling over to the boy and waving his hand to grab the others attention.  
  
Seonghwa noticed and knicked Wooyoung in the side, the latter turning to him nonchalantly and turning off his music.  
  
“Can I asked you something?” Jongho asked Wooyoung once Seonghwa had motioned the other towards him.  
  
“Anything for my favorite little student,” Wooyoung gushed.  
  
“No offense, but how are you still at school?”  
  
“Because digging tunnels under the ocean does not work,” Wooyoung immediately responded, drawing the words out. “Let me tell you, that was a terrible Friday afternoon.”  
  
“No. I meant why haven’t they kicked you out yet? They do kick people out here right?”  
  
“Oh, my brother vouches for me! The school loves him,” Wooyoung laughed.  
  
“You have a brother?” Yunho asked in amazement.  
  
“The school likes someone related to you?” Mingi parroted Yunho’s intonation, equally confused but somehow the latter’s question offended the boy a bit more.  
  
“Wait Wooyoung, what’s your last name?” Jongho asked to which 6 heads whipped to face the youngest boy in a split second.  
  
“You know, we really don’t know that much about each other,” Yeosang mumbled quietly.  
  
“It’s P. Wooyoung.” Seonghwa responded looking at Wooyoung for confirmation. “But I have no idea what the P. stands for.”  
  
“Yeah. It’s just Park,” the younger answered. “But no one ever remembers.”  
  
“Your name…” San breathed out.  
  
“…is Park Wooyoung?” Hongjoong finished for her.  
  
“Wow! You got it!” Wooyoung clapped.  
  
Yeosang blinked. “But that means…”  
  
“Your older brother is…” Mingi started to say but couldn’t quite get the words out.  
  
“Jimin!” Wooyoung shouted with unadulterated glee.  
  
They all froze, bodies turning rigid and eyes blown wide. Jongho looked on as they all gaped at the younger boy as he continued to rattle on, oblivious as to their reactions.  
  
“He’s actually named after my great-great-grand dad! I’m pretty sure he graduated when Seonghwa and Hongjoong were in their first year!”  
  
“YOU’RE RELATED TO PARK JIMIN?!” Hongjoong exploded at the same time Yunho crawled over him to scream “YOUR BROTHER IS PARK JIMIN?!” in Wooyoung’s face.  
  
“Yeah,” Wooyoung shrugged. “What about it?”  
  
“Yeah,” Jongho shrugged along with him. “What does that mean?”  
  
“But Wooyoung, I make fun of you twenty times a day. Please don’t tell your brother. Oh my god have you told your brother? He knows doesn’t he? He hates me? I’m going to die,” Mingi rambled, utterly terrified. “I’m sorry for every mean thing I have ever said to you.  
  
“I’m not!” Seonghwa threw out.  
  
“Wooyoung, you’re my best friend! I’ve known you for years! And you never told me???” San sounded offended.  
  
Yeosang clutched his chest in a similar betrayal, staring at the younger boy as if he had sprouted horns which was, now in relative comparison to what they had just learned, actually more likely to happen than the present circumstances.  
  
“You’re Jimin’s little brother…” Yeosang breathed out and it didn’t seem like a question but like a sad revelation.  
  
“I didn’t think you any of you guys knew him? He wasn’t even at school with a good 2/3rds of you.”  
  
“I knew him,” Yeosang murmured softly.  
  
A sense of nostalgia fully washed over him and drowning him in a sticky, inescapable sea of memories: ones he had been desperately trying to tie with the thickest twine he could imagine and leave to die rotting in the abandoned basement at the very deepest recesses of his mind.  
  
The words seemed to draw Yunho out his chaotically fuelled frenzy with Mingi which consisted of the two of them repeatedly hitting each other’s arms and mumbling ‘Did you know?’, ‘No, of course, I didn’t know!’, ‘Oh, please. Yeosang tells you everything’.  
  
“You know Park Jimin? THE Park Jimin??” Yunho pressed Yeosang. “But you weren’t even at-”  
  
“Knew him,” he corrected with a trace of bitterness laced into the words. “I knew him a long time ago…”  
  
“I don’t remember him ever mentioning you,” Wooyoung said pensively, cocking his head to the side like a small child.  
  
“He wouldn’t.”  
  
Hongjoong looked at her concerned, reaching out to grab her arm before he pulled herself away from the group. “Yeosang what are you-”  
  
“Seonghwa,” he pipped up quietly, shyly even and it caught them all off guard. “Can we go study now?”  
  
He nodded his head knowingly and walked her out of the room, a gentle hand at the nape of his back and a soft smile tugging at his lips. He turned at the door, pushing the younger through it and giving them a solemn look.  
  
“Seonghwa, what happened?” Hongjoong asked the other.  
  
“It’s not my story to tell,” he responded and followed Yeosang out the room.


	14. What's Important to You ?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I edited this one to give more #tension. Please enjoy the added ~ tension ~ for fun.

“What if I put arsenic in lip injections?” Yeosang gargled out as he shovelled large amounts of cereal into his mouth. 

Hongjoong sat across from him and Mingi, San at his side, staring horrified and disgusted at the boy in front of him. He bounced his leg in agitation for a moment listening to the crunch of the younger’s chewing before he slammed his fork down on the table. 

“Please chew with your mouth closed,” He chastised. 

“Oh my god, that would totally work,” San laughed, high fiving the other boy excitedly. 

“Right?! Like it’s such a fad,” Yeosang answered San, ignoring Hongjoong altogether. 

“I don’t even think you would have to hide it,” San said. “I bet people wouldn’t even care.”

Hongjoong looked at them curiously. “Come on. You can’t be serious?”

“What?” Yeosang asked, looking over to him. 

“That wouldn’t seriously work. No one would keep using it.”

“You don’t know women,” San said.

“Who would honestly use that?” Hongjoong probed again, unconvinced. 

“Girls will do anything for beauty,” Mingi nodded. 

“Why the hell would you know?” Hongjoong erupted at him. 

Yeosang and San simultaneously came to his defence. “He comes to girls’ night,” they chorused. 

“Mingi?” Hongjoong asked dumbfounded. “Mingi goes to girls’ night?” 

“He’s really good at painting nails,” San chimed. 

“Mingi?” Hongjoong queried. 

Mingi cockily raised his hand with a smirk. “It’s one of my many hidden talents,” he said adjusting his tie. 

“Wait since when was there a girls’ night and why am I not invited?” the elder seemed offended. “And why do you go?” 

“I don’t know,” Yeosang shrugged. “Soyeon started it. She invited me and I invited San because we’re roommates. Lia goes sometimes too. And a bunch of the second year econ girls like Yeri and Yeji.” 

“Why wasn’t I invited?!” 

“Did you want to come?” San asked raising his eyebrow. 

“No! Yes! Maybe!” Hongjoong sputtered. “I’m just confused as to why you would pick Mingi first.” 

“He has a very strong effeminate side,” Yeosang mused thoughtfully. 

“Which means he’s very comfortable in his own masculinity,” San added with a nod. 

“No toxic manhood in this family,” Mingi drawled to which Yeosang and San started clapping. 

Hongjoong stared on with bewilderment. 

“What the hell is going on today?” 

It was an odd day, Mingi’s pastimes only somewhat lending into the bizarre air of the day. Hwiyoung and Lia had somehow impaled each other’s hand with rusted nails and were now receiving tetanus treatment. Jongho had refused to stop calling Hongjoong ‘King Namjoon’s Spawn’ after learning the elder’s full name was Kim Hongjoong and immediately thinking of another famous grad from Jimin’s year. Perhaps Seonghwa had been the one to tell him but that wasn’t entirely relevant.

Yunho found Yeosang sitting on a bench inside the economics buildings, reading a book as he waited for the other. This time it was Dracula which he was very animatedly laughing at as he turned the pages. This, on all accounts, was not usually, but what followed, most certainly, was. Yeosang’s back was to him, having propped himself up against the wooden armrest and extended his legs out the length of the bench, a pair of dress slacks covering them, navy clad ankle crossed over navy clad ankle. Yunho said goodbye to Lucas and Mark before walking up beside him. 

“So, you know Jimin?” 

Yeosang levelled him with a look as if to say, ‘don’t go there’ and put his book down, swinging his feet around to the floor and standing up. 

“Where’d you go yesterday?” 

“I just had to talk to Seonghwa about synth dis,” Yeosang lied through his teeth as if Yunho hadn’t been so thoroughly trained at every aspect of Kang Yeosang. “You know how hard it is.”

“Yeah, but that was right after you mentioned knowing Wooyoung’s brother,” he coaxed. 

Yeosang hummed in response. 

Yunho wrung his hands in front of him. The little signet ring he wore on his pinkie turning round and round the finger in an anxious circle. He bore circled under his eyes slightly darker than this time in the semester had warrant for, and the top of his tie was loosened so as to allow the unpopping of a button along his collar bone. 

“It’s just funny how you left right after someone mentioned Park Jimin.” 

Yeosang kept his head level and gazing straight down the hall, not turning to look at the boy beside him.

“And what of it?” 

“Nothing,” Yunho shrugged in pretend indifference. “I just was curious. I mean you’ve never told me you knew him before.” 

“I don’t tell you everything,” he quipped back before the words had even processed in her head.

And it was a lie. They both knew it was a lie. A pestering little itch of a fallacy that dug under both of their skins the moment Yeosang uttered it. It was a ugly, little, frightful thing all cloaked in secrecy and dripping with something he couldn’t quite place. But then he looked at Yunho, only mere seconds after letting the words tumble from his mouth, and he knew what it is.  
“Everything important,” Yunho corrected, growing more irritated. 

But that’s the thing. He did tell Yunho everything. He told him about his exams and his friends, his crazy ideas and his stupid ones. Yeosang woke him up in the middle of the night with his fears and his disappointments and made Yunho sit through endless banters on things which ultimately mattered not to either of the two. He told Yunho every single that happened in his life.  
“That’s because it’s not important,” Yeosang bit back rather unfriendly, matching his exasperation. 

“Not to you.” 

“Yeah. It isn’t important to me. So why do you care so much?” 

Of, course, Yeosang already knew the answer. But he was prideful and had clawed tooth and nail, over bloody bodies and the misplaced animosity of stereotypes to get here. And he already knew that everything he ever said was important to Yunho because she was sharing it with him. 

“I mean I think it’s kind of a fun piece information to share. Like you could have said ‘Hey Yunho, did I ever tell you I know the grand almighty elder Park?’ and then I could have said, ‘No, Yeosang. That’s really interesting.’” 

“I do not sound that like.” 

“Well, I wouldn’t know,” Yunho mocked. “Because you never actually did tell me in the first place. Guess I’m not important enough to know about Mr. Park.” 

“His name is Jimin,” he grumbled. 

“Oh, so you’re pretty close then.” 

“Not anymore.” 

“So you were pretty close with him. With Jimin.” he pestered. 

Yeosang glared at him. “Yunho, stop. Seriously.” 

“At one point. You and Jimin…” 

“I don’t like you talking Jimin, okay?” he threw out, clearly annoyed, finally letting his emotions get the better of him. 

“Why?” 

Yeosang bit back the curses which hung deep in his throat, on little ropes waiting to be slung forth. His chest heaved with emotions he hadn’t felt in a long while and didn’t think, before this moment, that Yunho could ever possibly be the cause of. It was difficult and infuriating and most of all confusing. It was a fire claiming his body wrapping in a vicious volition to kill but at the back of his mind, there sat a nagging wonder of how it had all come ablaze in the first place. 

Yunho matched him, letting his gaze tear straight into the other’s body. Yeosang felt so… exposed underneath the seething calculation that sat in Yunho’s eyes. He swallowed thickly, huffing out a breathe before speaking. 

“Why don’t you like me talking about Jimin?” 

“I just- I just don’t, okay?” 

“I’d like to have a reason.” 

“Shut up, Yunho. This isn’t about you,” he huffed. 

“It’s never about me!” Yunho yelled and all of a sudden Yeosang had no control over his muscles. 

He paused, body as tense as a whip, and whirled around at him like a tempest, the anger rolling off his body in waves as he faced Yunho. 

“What the ever loving fuck is that supposed to mean?” 

Yunho quieted down, refusing to look at the other. Yeosang stalker over and gripped Yunho the front of his tie, shoving him against the dark red cabinet next to them. Yeosang slammed Yunho against it and the statue at the top rocked back and forth precariously. The hall had emptied out as students filtered to lunch, which was coincidentally, where they were supposed to be heading right now. His shirt rumbled under Yeosang’s hand.

“No, Yunho. What the fuck was that?” 

“Nothing!” he screamed defensively, their faces inches apart. 

Yeosang’s hot breathe mingled with Yunho’s in the quiet, incensed space between them. Yeosang’s hands weren’t soft by any means, they weren’t the delicate fragile hands of the man his mother wanted him to be, nor were they beautiful. They were little with burns and scars, deep set callouses dusting the surfaces unevenly. But never, in his days, had Yunho seen them hold so much anger in the white of their knuckles and the snapping tendons of their wrists. 

“It so obviously wasn’t nothing!” Yeosang grit out, leaning forward, holding Yunho’s body there up against the frame of the case, the small lips of the shelves digging into his back.  
“Well, apparently neither of us are feeling particularly divulging today so I don’t have to tell you,” he taunted, raising his eyebrow. 

“Okay what the hell is going with you? Are you seriously upset about Jimin right now?”

Yunho’s smirk fell for a second before coming right back and stiffening itself in place with his pearly white teeth on display. 

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk about him,” the boy sniped back haughtily. 

“Oh my god. What do you want from me?!” Yeosang screamed in frustration, pulling Yunho’s tie harder and shoving him against the wood and glass once more with frantic eyes and a frenzied breath. 

“I don’t know!” Yunho screamed back. 

The bust of Machiavelli which had been teetering on the edge of the cabinet finally fell, smashing against the floor the second after the last word left Yunho’s mouth. They stood silently gaging each other, heaving breathes and shaking fists.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Yeosang said letting go and stepping back like a cornered animal. 

“I mean I don’t know.” 

“What the hell am I supposed to do with that!?” 

And he didn’t care. He really didn’t. But he also cared so much, too much. He hated how much he cared and how couldn’t stop. He hated the way it squeezed his heart and clouded his mind. He hated how his stomach fluttered when Yeosang smiled or laughed or did just about anything. Yunho hated, with every fibre of his being, how beautiful and untouchable the other was. He hated how Yeosang would never, not in a million years, look at him the way he wanted him to: the way Yunho looked at him. Above all, he hated the knowledge that Yeosang had kept something from him. And not just anything judging by the flinch in the other’s eye anytime the boy’s name was mentioned. 

“I don’t fucking care!“ he shouted, even though that was all he ever did: care and care too much. 

“How is that fair to me?” Yeosang shouted back, and it might have just been another question to her, but to Yunho it was everything: everything he feared about laying his heart open to the other in the first place. 

The air grew cold around Yunho. It stung his arms and the back of his neck, shivering down his spine. Guilt washed over him like a cold river that threatened to fill his lungs until he was submerged in it. He looked down at his feet. 

“It isn’t,” he muttered in realization. 

“What?” Yeosang asked, confused and breathy. 

Yunho looked back up again and met Yeosang’s eyes like a reset, surprisingly calmed down from the earlier outbursts. “I said it isn’t fair to you.” 

“Yunho what’s-”

“I’m gonna go,” he said softly. 

Yeosang furrowed his brows dumbfounded and without knowing it, hurt registered on his face. “Yunho?” 

“Sorry. I’ll… I’ll talk to you later, okay?” 

“Yunho?” Yeosang called out to his retreating figure watching as he walked away without looking back once. “Yunho!” but he didn’t stop. 

Yunho didn’t stop. 

Yeosang passed through the halls in a haze, not bothering to pick up the book he had left sitting on the bench: a signed first edition with fraying edges and small mercury stain on the back cover. Yeosang hadn’t realized where he was walking until he ended up in front of the school gate. It saw on the bottom of the hill, rusted iron, and cut the cobbled stone path from the school to the dock straight through with a towering floral pattern of twisted metal. He sighed heavily and stared at the sea tumbling by in the distance. No one could say for certain how long he stood there but once his fingers grew cold and purple, and his lips had grown chapped and dry, he left. 

“What’s wrong?” Hongjoong asked the younger when he came to pick up his laptop that afternoon. 

“We fought,” Yeosang said simply, staring straight ahead like a robot. 

“Who? You and Yunho?” 

He nodded mechanically not saying a word. 

“You fight all the time,” Hongjoong said. 

He furrowed his brow. “He left.” 

“He what?”

“He never leaves,” he whispered.

“Yunho left… without apologizing?”

“No. He did. But it didn’t… it wasn’t…. it’s just he never leaves,” he finally breathed again as if the words were so foreign to his tongue that he had yet to grasp them. 

“What happened?” 

“Well, I broke that creepy bust of dear old Niccolò in the government building,” Yeosang recollected. “So there’s that.” 

“Good riddance but I meant what happened with Yunho?” 

“He left me,” he said again and although it was only the third time Hongjoong had heard the other speak it aloud it had been running through Yeosang’s head in a persistent cycle since it had  
happened. 

Yeosang couldn’t focus on a single other thing but the sight of Yunho’s square shoulders retreating into the distance and the feeling of his voice failing on deaf ears. They had made a promise, what seemed like a million years ago, and Yunho broke it. Yeosang wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that. 

“Yeosang, what was the fight about?” 

“Jimin.” 

Hongjoong exhaled slowly. “Oh wow okay.”

The elder brought his hands up behind his head. “I mean I don’t exactly know the whole story, but that can’t be good.” 

Hongjoong then filled the younger’s line of sight as he leaned in front of him, grabbing his shoulders to steady the boy. “Are you okay?” 

“No…” he pouted. 

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

Yeosang was silent for a second before he spoke up, shoulders stiffening with conviction. Hideo thought the younger’s eyes looked that of a soldier preparing for war, but he saw a fear in them he had never seen Yeosang wear before. Not facing down the barrel of a gun, not trapped in the flaming basement of the mechanics building last year, and not even the day he had met the other’s mother. 

“I wanna call Jimin,” he said and damn, Hongjoong was afraid too.


	15. Story Time from Block B

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fun Fact: my favorite department at the school is the mechanics kids.

The engineering department. What to say about the engineering department? What to say that wouldn’t end one up 12 feet under (because Genius kids didn’t get caught), or with radiation poising (of course from a rarer isotope than U235), or a missing limb (courtesy of whatever botched machine they produced), or third degree burns (from blue lit landmines and specialized Molotov cocktails), or… well, any number of creatively inflicted major injuries. 

The mechanics and weapons department was the smallest of all the 7 schools at Genius. There was medical, perhaps the most cutthroat and most prestigious of all the departments. The drop-out rate was 0% but the mortality rate was about 26%. Cyber was the fourth largest department, having been founded at the start of the internet, but it was steadily growing and rapidly expanding. If Hongjoong was any measure of the students, they were dedicated innovators. Perhaps, it would soon branch with a space operations focused school but that was a discussion for another day. The economic, political, and clandestine branches of Genius were closely linked and frighteningly so: the three largest of the 7 departments. Yunho, Mingi, and San spent much of their time together which was, for the school, a wonder thing! But was, for the world, a drastic and chaotic curse. 

Yeosang’s department, Bio-chemistry, was understandably interrelated with mechanics and medical. It was mostly female populated to no one’s surprise. Women liked poison: a tale as old as time. Bio-chemistry was the smallest department, right before mechanics. The two were home to… a rather interesting bunch. The fact of the matter was Yeosang’s branch was just as crazy and volatile as Wooyoung’s. It’s just that Yeosang's were more secretive and quiet about it. Diseases and explosions just didn’t get the same coverage. What a crying shame. Mechanics- covering weapons, technology, nuclear, bombs, missiles, incendiary, and any other boom under the sun- was, what Wooyoung liked to claim, the most fun department. That was until someone dies and then it was… a blast. Wooyoung thought of that joke himself. He used it, much to Seonghwa’s chagrin, at least twice on a daily basis. If ever there was a more righteous cause to cut someone’s tongue from their mouth, Seonghwa insisted San could stab him with his obsidian dagger. That one hurt like a bitch; Wooyoung and Mingi knew from experience. 

Anyways, mechanics! They called themselves engineers but perhaps they were more along the lines of amateur terrorists or enthused tinkers. There wasn’t a soul in the school who was not familiar with Wooyoung, whose last name apparently was Park and whose brother was apparently Jimin, both pieces of information having spread quickly through the school by Jongho’s roommate Chani. That was the last time Jongho would ever tell him anything. Although, he did get a small hand grenade out of it though, which was the school’s loose equivalent to a 10 dollar bill.  
Then there were Hwiyoung, Lia, and Hyunjin. Surprisingly the group of 4 was exactly a third of the entire second year mechanics syndicate which was nestled in the second block of the mechanics wing, affectionally named Block B by its residents. Of course, every other year had about 70 kids in it, but well, their first year had not been kind to them. Hyunjin lost the hearing in one ear and Wooyoung lost a toe. The former had been very inconveniencing, and the latter had been of little impact. Well, that and the incident now determined that the mechanics mortality rate was 43%. It was a hard major, but someone had to do it. 

When Wooyoung walked in that morning, Lia and Hwiyoung were still tending to their hand holes… their hole hands… the gaping incisions they had recently made in their palms. Block B was quiet that morning. Unnervingly so. Anytime a building which was known for bangs and bongs and crashes and screeching was silent it was a bad omen. 

The room was dark, on account of the singular window at the back wall, a stained glass depiction of the last judgment with a crudely spray painted skull and cross bones in the place of Jesus’s head and a vibrantly yellow smiley face on every single demon. The drawers of every cabinet and shelf and storage locker sat open haphazardly revealing guns and wires and bombs and scraps. Half constructed missile shells lay hollow in the lofty space along the wall. Weapons, in the process of being manufactures, were scattered between them, some almost finished and other just started. 

The concrete floor was stained and cracked in places, marked with paint and burns and… was that ashes? Every surface of every desk and workbench was cluttered with tools and things, empty beer cans sat in a carboard box next to Hwiyoung’s table. Wooyoung raised his eyebrow at his two friends bent over the boy’s work bench, unbandaged hands locked in a hold preparing to arm wrestle. 

“We stigmata-ed each other,” Hwiyoung explained, looking over the Wooyoung after hearing the other enter. 

“Yeah,” Lia smiled. “But like satanically." 

“Then what’s that for?” he asked pointing to the table which had been cleared of nails and scrap metal: vials and boxes of liquids and powders dumped on the aluminium in what appeared to have been a frantic swiping of the surface. 

“Unrelated,” they simultaneously responded, drawing their gazes back to each other in an intense battle. 

“So…” Hyunjin drawled out from Wooyoung’s right. “Your Jimin’s little brother?” 

“Does it matter?” Wooyoung shrugged. “Everyone seems so enamoured by him and yeah I respect him and all that, but come on.” 

“You’re much cooler,” Hyunjin smiled. “Besides he wasn’t even an engineering major.” 

They heard a grunt and a faint spattering of screws hitting the floor. Lia stood there with a giant grin upon her face as Hwiyoung laid, chest on to table, lamenting his loss. She pumped her hand in the air victoriously, sticking her tongue out at the other. 

“So are we finally ready to suit up?” Hyunjin asked the two. 

Hwiyoung picked his head off the table, hair frayed out around him in a tangle of dark curls. “Today’s reactors day?” 

They quickly dressed and descended the steel ladder underground, the walls covered in multicoloured blueprints and sketches, some faded from age and some, additions by Lia, written pink glitter gel pen with tiny heart and star doodles. The ladder was situated inside a large tube, a metal tunnel belonging to an old retired space craft. There was a rumour in the engineering department that it was the original Apollo mission hull, but no one knew for sure. They liked to fill it with graffiti and schematics on the off-hand it actually was because, well, kids like to deface government property. 

“Oh, it’s hot today. I wonder what that means,” Hyunjin laughed, clapping his hands in excitement as he hopped off the base of the ladder. 

“It means something’s wrong,” Lia rolled her eyes, jumping down a second later. 

“It means more work for us,” Hwiyoung whined. 

Wooyoung crossed his suited arms once he had joined them. “Guys, come on. We can’t let another nuclear leak happen.” 

“I swear this is all Seonghwa’s influence,” Lia accused, pointing her finger in the boy’s face. “You used to love radiation scares.” 

“I still do, I promise. Let’s just try to contain them for once.” 

“Fine,” she grumbled. 

Hyunjin walked over and swung an arm around her shoulder with a wink. “Don’t worry, baby. I’d let you radiate my reactor any day.” 

She scoffed and elbowed him in the stomach. 

“Can I please kill him?” she asked Hwiyoung and Wooyoung who watched the two with amused smiled. 

“He’s your boyfriend,” Wooyoung said waving her off. “Do whatever you want with him.” 

Hyunjin did not look offended by the comment, but instead closer to Lia and whispered incomprehensibly into her ear which caused the girl to blush profusely and smack him on the arm repeatedly. 

The reactor was surprisingly fine. After analysing the numerous calculations on the regulatory board and performing a slew of general check-ups, they all determined as much. Their incendiary mechanics class a real drag. Honestly, the school only required it every sophomore year in order to have free labour to maintain the nuclear reactors buried beneath it. So, they took a break. Wooyoung called it a peaceful protest against the exploitations of capitalism in educational institutions. 

When Wooyoung came back from his locker and heavily threw his body down onto his chair with a loud smack, the other three simply ignored him until he began to exaggeratedly sigh. 

“I’m depressed,” he announced to the room. 

“Ok,” Hwiyoung answered.

Hyunjin actually looked quite sad for the kid. “Oh, bud. I’m sorry. What happened?” 

“We never had magic, so we invented it. We made machines to mesmerize and to terrorize just as our dreams did. Modeled them after strange and foreign things to do the unthinkable. Then we forgot. Forgot that what they were doing replaced magic itself. Grew greedy with all the impossible fantasies we realized. We created a monster, not of metal and wire but of ourselves: a flesh and bone shadow to lumber behind us and push us to the point where all the earth would fall at our feet like a conquered foe.”

“What on earth is he-” Lia began to complain before Wooyoung picked back up again, continuing his rant. 

“But it isn’t. Not at all,” the boy continued. “The sad part is the magic quickly gave way to nightmare. It rumbles in the distance, growling deep and low. It hunkers in the shaded night, watching, waiting. Our magic will destroy us one day. And we’ll decide when.”

“Oh my god. Shut up, Wooyoung!” Lia yelled in vexation. 

“You DS broke again, didn’t it buddy?” Hyunjin asked in pity. 

Wooyoung immediately softened and pouted. “Yeah, it just keeps freezing and it has their weird blue line on the screen. I can’t even fix it…” 

“I’ll get you a new one, okay?” Hyunjin coaxed. 

“Okay…” 

“He seems so sad,” Hwiyoung added turning to Lia. 

“No one can understand they bond they share,” she responded very seriously.


	16. The Quartermaster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternatively titled, I don't know how to write a fight scene :((  
> Also I finally battened down all the minor/side character so sorry if it was a little confusing :((((

Finally, for the first time since Jongho had been added to their haphazard little family, all eight of them sat at dinner together on Friday night. Yunho and Yeosang had been fighting and refused to talk to each other. Mingi, in an effort to not pick sides between the two, had been avoiding everyone altogether and Jongho almost thought for a moment that the elder had left school before witnessing him scurry between buildings in his peripheral vision at 6 in the morning. Hongjoong… Hongjoong just didn’t come out much. When he wasn’t sought out for advice or emotional support, the 4th year was staunchly committed to finishing his independent research on time. Seonghwa was likeminded but Jongho had seen the other 4th year out and about with Juyeon and Vernon. And then there was Wooyoung, who very persistently and very animatedly had inserted himself in the first year’s life. He saw Wooyoung every goddamn day. 

Lastly, San. On a regular basis, Jongho had no idea where Choi San went, and he didn’t want to know. He was still wholly, irrevocably, and paralyzingly terrified of the older boy. San wore fire in his eyes and a dagger on his belt. He took no shit, but he also didn’t take slight grazes of interaction which would leave any other person shrugging. Jongho knew San could kill him, but more than that, he knew San would kill him if he wanted to. And a large part of him thought the other wanted to. 

He had seen San in the bathroom in the economics building, having come from an intro class and immediately halted, body freezing up when he met his eyes. 

“I’m a gentle soul,” he had explained to the boy, washing his bloody hands in the sink. “I clean all my knives by hand.” 

“Why would you – why would you have to clean your knives?” Jongho had stuttered out. 

The second year had put on a wry grin. “You know.” 

“I do know,” Jongho had pouted sadly. “I just hoped I was wrong.” 

But they all, all eight of them, were somehow seated at a table together. Jongho thought it was Seonghwa’s doing despite it being something the other would never in a million years own up to. It was nice. Was being the operative word, until the slurping had started. Wooyoung sat there sipping noisily at his neon red soda, sucking it through a horridly green straw with an intense amount of fervour. 

“Ugh, I can’t believe you drink that revolting garbage,” Seonghwa disparaged with a repulsed frown. 

“Cherry soda? Really?” San teased. 

He nodded, still wearing a bilious sneer. “It’s downright disgusting, that nauseating sludge.” 

“I swear I've seen him drink the liquid from a jar of preserved toes before,” San balked at the elder, whether it was in Wooyoung’s defence or nor Jongho could not quite tell. 

Hongjoong bristled at that. “Why do you have preserved toes?”

“Why don’t you have preserved toes?” Mingi shot back at the Hongjoong’s incredulous remark on behalf of San. 

This Jongho could clearly tell was an act of comradery and not a derogatory dig at the one being hazed. 

“It looks rather poisonous,” Jongho added. 

San excitedly slammed a tiny glass bottle down on the table. “Here’s some real poison for ya!” he exclaimed as it leaked a strange milky liquid from its screw cap top. 

“Do you carry that around at all times?” Jongho asked in a small voice. 

“Yes,” San smiled wickedly back at him. 

“I’m not gonna drink poison again!” Wooyoung yelled. “It’s not like I’m trying to kill myself, it’s just… an occupational hazard.” 

“Oh, Yunho can drink it,” Yeosang announced offhandedly, seemingly engrossed in another task. 

“What?” Hongjoong asked confused. 

“Poison…?” Seonghwa inquired for clarification. 

“Haha yeah. But if you have a little bit every day you grow immune to it,” he responded still not fully engaged in their conversation. “Come on, Seonghwa. You should know that.” 

“But I never-” Yunho started to say. 

“Oh my god, you didn’t!” Seonghwa yelled in accusation. 

“Yeosang…” Mingi joined after a second. “You can’t keep doing this.” 

“Well, no need to get angry now. What’s done is done and it’s actually not too impactful to any of you so shut the hell up.”

“This is about the almighty Park isn’t it?!” Yunho exploded. 

“It’s really not about Wooyoung’s brother,” Yeosang grumbled. 

“The what is it about?” 

“I don’t know? You being a dick maybe?” 

“So it is about Park.” 

“HIS NAME IS JIMIN!” he shouted slamming her hands on the table and jostling the china slightly. 

“THEN START CALLING HIM THAT!” Yunho yelled back, also in a defensive position. 

“WHY SHOULD IT MATTER TO YOU WHAT I CALL HIM?!” 

“Please stop,” Mingi sighed. 

“SHUT UP, MINGI!” they screamed simultaneously. 

“STOP FIGHTING!” Jongho screamed and they all feel silent at the outburst. “Honestly! What are you? A bunch of children? Cause you sure are acting like it. If I had known every god forsaken  
moron in this school had the emotional capacity of a goddamn rooster and the psychological maturity of a repressed baby, then maybe I wouldn’t have come here with such high expectations!” 

His voice carried over the table, the rest of the crew staring back at the youngest with wide eyes. 

“What the hell do you expect to achieve if you don’t FUCKING TALK TO EACH OTHER?! Have you ever heard of communication? Or responsibility? To think that-”

“Oh bugger off,” Seonghwa groaned, interrupting the rant. 

The rest of them sat there stunned to silence for a moment. The air was tense with the tumbling ends of Jongho’s words. 

“That’s a load of horse shit and you know it,” the 4th year continued causing Jongho’s mouth to drop. 

“Wow...” Hongjoong breathed out. “He really doesn’t get us all, does he?” 

“He is not going to last here very long with that attitude,” Mingi added. 

“No,” San shook his head in agreement. “No, he isn’t.” 

“Jongho, my buddy, my friend, my pal,” Wooyoung implored, placing his hand on the other’s back. “The way we settle things here, at the Factory,” he paused with a roguish grin, “is a good old fashioned boxing match.” 

Some of the tables nearby had heard the exchange and began mischievously murmuring among themselves. A frenzied excited energy began to fill the room. Mingi stood up from the table and lofted himself on his chair, spreading his arms wide with a beaming smile. 

“Genius!” he bellowed out into the hall. “Tonight we fight!” 

The dining room erupted into cheers and claps, hollers and yops. The shouts came tumbling through the space like a sea wave crashing over every single body seated at dinner, drowning them a frenetic fervour. It was like a celebration had begun and a reckoning was wrought upon them all rolled into one. Jongho thought it was thundering outside in large cracks across the sky, as if God was throwing bolts at the side of the island in rage. He looked toward the windows and saw no such rain. Only then did he realize it was the rhythmic stomps and clangs of fists and heels against tables and chairs and the tiled floor beneath his feet. 

They processed like a giant amassed organism, moving with a thousand legs but one destination in mind. Someone must have chipped into their firework storage, or wait no, they were flares blazing away against the black blanket of the sky. One boy had, somehow, acquired a large banner and was waving it above their heads as they marched and skipped, jumping over walls and benches, through the school grounds to a small building out behind the gym and recreation structure. It was a suspiciously new-style building for how in disrepair it was: a dilapidated modern Bauhaus bulwark. 

They stumbled inside through the door, a pouring torrent of students filing through the tiny opening continuously until it was no longer possible to fit them all inside.  
Wooyoung and Hongjoong stood behind Yeosang, smushed against the ring. Seonghwa was having a whispered discussion with Minho as Jongho stood awkwardly between the two. Yeosang was peeling off his dress blazer to a few catcalls from the crowd. Soyeon came to help the boy shed his tie and dress shirt, revealing a white tank top underneath. 

Mingi and San bastioned themselves at Yunho’s corner which was, on the whole, rather unsurprisingly even given San’s rooming situation. Yunho was undressing in a likeminded manner with the aid of Mark and Mingi. It was odd to see the boy so serious for once. Truth be told, it was terrifying. He had a couple more supporters at the base of his corners: namely, Yeji and Lucas who were give aways but also surprisingly Felix. It should be known that if a student has chosen to stand in support of a fighter at the unofficial settlement match, the punishment inflicted on the group was equal to that of the injuries accumulated during said match. The hospital wing was very vexed by this process but understood its necessity in the keeping the relative peace of school’s days. 

A rather considerably intimidating boy, Juhaknyeon held their hands in a jumble, tied with a sullied white strip of cloth that wrapped over each’s palm and fastened them weakly together. Yeosang and Yunho locked gazes, fuelled with something no one in the room could place but feeling it palpably roll from their bodies, nonetheless. 

“This is a surprise,” Juhaknyeon goaded. 

The Jeju boy had seen a lot in his days as the school’s unofficial settlement quartermaster. His own lips were busted, and it was certainly an off week if not three of his ribs were broken, or at the very least bruised. Of course, the quartermaster was not required to partake in half the fights which inevitably -and per tradition- happened each year, but well, Juhaknyeon was often in dire need of a little nonverbal resolution. He was a 3rd year in clandestine operations, having been in charge of the unofficial fights since the beginning of second year. Taeyang had passed it on to him after graduating, a grim reaper scythe patch stitched onto his cashmere sweater arm. 

“It’s been a while seen I’ve seen a row between two love birds,” he smirked, and the biting glares shot in his direction by the owners of the wrists in his hold were enough to knock a man dead. 

“Any special requests?” 

“To the whistle,” Yeosang grit out. 

Juhaknyeon raised his eyebrow. “You good with that, bro?” he asked Yunho sceptically. 

Yunho nodded resolutely. 

“Alright then,” Juhaknyeon whispered back cocking his head. “TO THE WHISTLE!” he yelled out as he dropped their hands, letting the cloth flutter away, and scampering out of the centre of the ring. 

The crowd roared at his voice and clamoured over each other to the base of the boxing ring. It was old and smelled of mould, faded red and yellow tints to the matt below and frayed ropes along the sides: another old school artefact that any Genius grad, had there ever been a relatively comprehensive directory of all the alumni, would recognize if asked. 

“Punch his lights out, Kang,” someone shouted from the audience, possibly Soyeon, so that’s exactly what Yeosang did. 

With a guttural cry, he heaved his body forward, bicep curling with muscles as he struck his fist forward and straight into Yunho’s awaiting face, which had only moment before rushed to meet him. Yunho’s jaw made a resounding snap as Yeosang hit straight into it in a sweeping right hook, all the weight of his back and shoulder behind it. The boy’s head was thrown back, neck collapsing slightly as it rocketed back under the weight of Yeosang’s arm. He tossed it forward with all is might, cracking his forehead right into the smaller boy’s nose with a sickening pop.

Yeosang stumbled back on his heels a few steps, before wiping the blood away from his upper lip on the back of his wrist and hand as he drew the arm across his face. Yunho pitched forward and hurled his shoulder into the other’s gut, the breathe escaping from Yeosang’s lungs as Yunho made impact and staggering him further back still. The crowd around them went wild, throwing curses and gleeful laughs into the air. 

As the two bounced off the ring’s rope at the edge, Yunho released his arms from about the other’s waist and straightened his body in time with Yeosang. The boy snarled at Yunho and made three quick, calculated jabs into Yunho’s right diaphragm, alternating his hands. Yunho feinted at the last one, and rolled to the left out of his reach. Yeosang cut across the space and kneed him straight in the crotch, grabbing Yunho’s head as the boy crumpled over and kneeing him again in the face with the full force of his leg.

Yunho collapsed on the ground momentarily, his friends screaming for him to get back up. His hand shot out and he grabbed Yeosang’s ankle, sending the other tumbling to the mat, falling flat on his back. He crawled over the boy’s stunned body and tugged Yeosang’s arm out from where it had fallen under him and wrenched it behind, pinning it to the smaller’s shoulder blades as he flipped him over. Yeosang screamed out in pain and threw his head back, nailing Yunho in the face this time, another cracking sound resonating from the hit. Yunho released him and scrambled away. 

They both stood, seething and dripping blood from their noses, Yeosang cradling his arm which the other had only just let free. He raised his leg and kicked Yunho in the stomach with his shin in a sweeping arch, but the boy grabbed it as Yeosang landed the blow, pulling on it and careening him off balance. Yeosang rocketed forward into the other’s space, punching his good arm forward, which Yunho grabbed and threw to the side, sending his own fist back at the boy. Yeosang blocked it with his forearm and the two digressed into a flurry of jabs and hooks again.

They were angry, Jongho could tell. He guessed the minute he saw Yeosang spit blood onto the concrete. But they hesitated too. He saw it in their dilated pupils which shook right before they slammed their fists into each other’s bodies. They wanted to fight, they needed to fight. Anyone could see that. But there was a part in each of them that desperately wanted anything else. Jongho could see the strain of Yunho’s muscles as he held back the strength gathering in his swings and how Yeosang paused every moment before she went to hook Yunho in the jaw. It was bloody and it was hard, a smattering of fists and elbows and foreheads, resounding smacks against the floor, and harshened laboured heaving. But it was also sad, Jongho thought. Judging by the displeasure the elder two attempted to hide on their faces, they thought so too. 

Wooyoung walked quietly into the ring and before Jongho could even noticed, and grabbed Yeosang’s thigh where he went to thrust his knee up and Yunho’s forearm where his fist hung in the air. The two fighters blinked out of their combat fuelled haze and at the boy standing between them, holding their blows back. 

“Just stop,” he mumbled. 

They paused, letting their limbs fall beside them. Their ragged breathing filled the space, the crowd around having suddenly stilled too. 

“I- I was supposed to look out for you,” Yeosang eventually said. “I promised I would look out for you… and then I didn’t.”

“And who did you promise?” Yunho interrupted, sounding more hurt than anything else. “It was him.”

Yeosang hung his head down and refused to answer, refused to even look at anyone. 

“And he’s just so goddamn special you can’t even break a promise, right?” Yunho threw out and when Yeosang didn’t lift his head, he walked away, shrugging the other’s off where they tried to stop him. 

“If they tied, does that mean I get to beat all of you up now?” Juhaknyeon asked Seonghwa giddily. 

What he received in response was an unamused glare and a gun pointed in his face which was a remarkably efficient way to end the conversation.


	17. Sincerely Entitled, What the Fuck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This fic started as a slow burn for Yeosang and Yunho and then it became an ATEEZ fic and now it's divulging into a (mostly) 99 liners kpop fic so uhh.... enjoy i guess 
> 
> Let me know who to put in if anyone has any requests

“You’re pretty bad at the whole clandestine thing,” Mingi mused, hanging upside down on the side of the gangway between the government and clandestine buildings. 

The two were walking between Public Panic and Intelligence Agencies, but the free period they both had in between always amounted to something quite interesting. Mingi waved at the passing boys and girls beneath them on the thinning snow as he dangled from the third story, arms clumsily limp at the sides of his head and tie flapping over his face. His ankles were held in a vicious grip by San, the boy’s chest flush with the edge of the railing, arms crossed over each other in a vice. 

“Who said I was trying to hide?”

“You know you’re pretty strong.”

San just laughed at him and the movement jostled Mingi slightly where he hung, suspended over the courtyard. 

“It’s funny because you’re so sensitive. I’m still impressed you beat up Rocky your first year,” Mingi reminisced when San didn’t answer. “He’s a pretty buff dude. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that.” 

Mingi lifted his head slightly to peer up at the boy, gazing across his own dangling body. His shirt was pooled under his armpits and his blazer was almost slipping off his arms, pulled taught at the back of his shoulder blades in a bunch of fabric. 

“Fingers don’t grow back, you know,” he said. 

“It was only 3…”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “Only 3, San. You clandestine kids don’t take any shit, do you?” 

“I totally had Woo’s approval!” 

“Since when has Woo’s approval ever been a good thing?!” 

“And Yves told me to do it,” San shot back at the boy. 

“Yves? Like Yves Yves?” Mingi asked, flabbergasted. “Like that totally hot assassin who graduated last year Yves?” 

“Yes that one! Do you know any other Yves?” he grumbled, annoyed.

“Well no, but I-”

“Not surprised you like her. Girl’s a bombshell.” 

“Yeah,” Mingi sighed. “If I had to go, honestly, I’d want her to kill me. No offense,” he added to San. 

“None taken,” he politely replied, inclining his head. 

“What’s hanging,” someone with a bright voice joked from behind San. 

Mingi strained to look but his body was too far over the balcony to see. A couple students from below gave him odd looks as he swung slightly in the air. One took a picture which he posed for rather enthusiastically, he thinks it was Chaeyoung judging by the long, perfect brunette waves spilling over her navy jacket, but the blood was rushing to his head and his vision was a bit dizzy. 

“Oh, hey guys,” San replied casually to the unknown bodies behind him. 

“What’d he do this time?” one asked and Mingi knew it was Tzuyu. 

“Tzuyu!” he called out, flapping his arms. “Tzuyu help me!” 

Her auburn head peaked over the railing next to San’s and then Hendery’s mischievous grin popped over next to hers. 

“Well, what’d you do?” she asked. 

“I bet he lost her favourite pen,” Hendery added with smug smile. 

San narrowed her eyes down at the boy. “You stole my gel pen?” he grit out, tightening his hands on Mingi’s ankles. 

“No! No! I didn’t steal it!” Mingi defended. “Hendery, come on,” he groaned at the entirely self-pleasing asshole above him. “I’m already in hot water here. Друг познаётся в беде́.” 

“Oh, I see. We weren’t friends when I forgot to do my terrorist manifesto draft and wanted to copy yours but we’re friends when you’re hanging off a building.” 

“That was two years ago!” Mingi screeched back. “Get over it!” 

“I should learn Russian, “ Tzuyu said turning to San. 

“Like speaking or writing?” San asked the other, completely ignoring the other two. 

“I don’t know,” Tzuyu shrugged. “Both?”

“Oh, Cyrillic is a bitch though, man,” he gripped back. “Just do Serbian and you can fudge with a bit of Latin characters.” 

“Good idea,” Tzuyu smiled back. She brushed her sweater out of the way to check her watch. “Gah! Hendery, we have to go to hostage taking. We’re gonna be late again.”

“Oh, right!” Hendery chirped back. “Bye San!” he waved at the boy. “Bye, Mingi,” he waved over the railing. 

“I hate you!” Mingi screamed back as they left. 

“Mingi,” San chided him, pouting. “That’s not very nice.” 

He scoffed. “You’re holding me off a building.” 

“I have my reasons. I know they’re stupid but they’re still reasons.” 

Mingi raised his eyebrow. 

“You know I could drop you right now,” San smirked. 

“Nah, you love me too much,” he teased back, a dopey grin on his face. 

“I’LL FUCKING DROP YOU, YOU IDIOT!” 

“Mingi?” they both heard from below and looked down to see Jongho standing there with a horrified expression. 

“Oh, hey kid,” Mingi slurred out, getting increasingly dizzy as the time progressed. 

He would not, under any means, suggest hanging upside down for more than 10 minutes because wow, was his head starting to hurt. And the snow hurt his eyes. Maybe he should just… close them. 

“Oh my god, he’s dead!” Jongho screamed and took off like a bullet through the courtyard doors. 

San’s bubbling laugh washed over the now quiet space. 

“He thinks you’re evil,” Mingi said, succumbing to his fate and simply dangling there without struggle. 

“I know,” he smiled.

“He’s terrified of you.”

San tightened his grip, readjusting Mingi’s weight slightly. “I know.” 

“If I say I love you, will you let me go?” 

“Ha! No.”

He shrugged. “Была́ не была́.” 

“You know what there is,” San replied. “An impending drop for you if you don’t give me Jungwoo’s phone number.” 

“I told you I don’t have it!” Mingi yelled, opening his eyes to see the other glaring daggers at him. 

“Liar,” he hissed back and let go of one of Mingi ankles. 

Mingi’s body jolted in the air. 

“He’s the national animosity TA.” 

“That doesn’t mean I talk to him,” Mingi balked. “He sits with the teacher.” 

“God, I really want to drop you right now.” 

“Because I don’t have Jungwoo’s phone number?”

“No, because you’re an idiot.” 

“Who’s gonna study for intelligence agencies with you?” Mingi questioned feeling pretty proud of himself. 

“Juhaknyeon.” 

A look of desperate terror flashed over Mingi’s face. “God, I really wish you two weren’t friends.”  
\---  
Jongho all but sprinted across campus, forgoing his plan to attend office hours at the scene he had just witnessed. Everyone here was batshit crazy: every single goddamn person. Hongjoong, he needed to find Hongjoong. Hongjoong was sane… maybe. 

The cyber and surveillance department was nestled in the corner of campus, connected underground to the engineering department. It was an interesting mix of kids to have together, the former hacking the latter’s machines to wreak havoc when they had a disagreement on how to stock their shared vending machine in the common room.  
“SAN KILLIED MINGI!” Jongho yelled, throwing open the door to the computer lab. 

He was met with hissing and squinted eyes as the light from the doorway poured through into the dark room. Three heads turned to him, a fourth boy sleeping across his keyboard and a serious of f’s littering the middle of his code. 

“Close the door!” Hongjoong yelled and Jongho stumbled to slam it shut. 

“Did he steal her pen?” one of the boys snorted. 

“I’m sorry, what?” Jongho asked, assuming her misheard the other. 

“Changbin’s right.” Hongjoong waved the younger boy off. “He probably just took her pen. Mingi can’t die. It’s fine.” 

“He was holding him off the clan-gov bridge!”

“Ohhh, spicy,” Hongjoong wiggled his eyebrows. 

“Oh my god,” Jongho breathed out. 

“What?”

“You’re crazy too…” 

“God, that poor sucker,” Changbin shook his head. “Should I bring roses or lilies?” 

“To where?” Jongho asked. 

“His funeral,” Changbin chuckled. 

“Chrysanthemums,” Hongjoong replied. 

“Dude, how did you even get in here?” another boy asked Jongho, swivelling away from his screen to eye him. 

The first thing Jongho noticed about him was he looked incredibly beautiful, like model gorgeous. And then he noticed he looked incredibly angry. 

“Don’t antagonize him, Minho” Hongjoong mumbled. 

“I’m not. He just doesn’t seems way too soft to be Genius material.” 

Hongjoong sighed. “Jongho, this is my wonderful roommate Minho. Minho, this is Jongho. He’s a good kid leave him alone.” 

“I wasn’t doing anything…” Minho mocked him turning back to his computer and angrily mapping blast radiuses for different power plant SCADA meltdowns. 

“Look,” Hongjoong said, turning to Jongho. “He won’t drop him. Been there, done that. They confiscated his knives for like 2 days and he was way too bored to ever do it again.” 

“But he-”

“Jongho,” Hongjoong stopped him. “What’s up with you? Are you passing your classes?” 

“I got a principal’s commendation.” 

“YOU GOT A WHAT?!” 

“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT I SWEAR!” 

“HOW THE FUCK DID YOU GET A COMMENDATION?” 

“Wooyoung was walking around with this…” Jongho frantically gestured around himself in a vague manner, “…thing.”

Hongjoong hummed in acknowledgement. 

“And I popped up behind him and accidentally made him drop it. So the thing exploded and one of pieces flew off and lodged into this guy’s neck and he then people were clapping. I was really confused and then someone brought us to the principal’s office. Professor Townsend came in and man was that guy smiling. I still don’t-”

“You killed Dr. P?!”

“Well, it was really Wooyoung, right? That’s what I told them. But he got all humble about it and said the ‘element of surprise’ or whatever was really important.”

“You successfully performed your first extra credit, buddy,” Hongjoong cooed at him. 

“My what now?”

“Your first hit,” Hongjoong smiled. “You did it!” 

“Congratulations!” Changbin yelled from across the room. 

“You’re fitting in, good job. I’m proud of you,” Hongjoong continued like a proud parent. 

“I’m just… getting the hang of things, I guess?”

“Why did that sound like a question?”

Jongho huffed and collected himself for a moment. “I’m getting the hang of things,” he said again with more conviction this time. 

“Good. Now leave me alone so I can weaponize space.”


	18. Girl's Night

If one had walked into the lobby of Kensington Dormitory that night looking for a beverage or small edible treat from the snack supply, they would have been most sorely disappointed at what was awaiting them behind the pantry closet. Perhaps, one year, someone had invented a small portable device by which to create a mobilized synthetic tornado, because it certainly resembled as much inside. 

And, if someone was seeking out Song Mingi, they would most likely, seeing as they were not one of the few regular members of the Saturday night rituals taking place, be quite surprised at the state of the Russian oligarch heir. His thick black shoulder length was tied back into a bun with a silken pink scrunchie, a wonderfully pastel lavender headband holding the wisps away from his face. His jewelled crystal rings were placed in a small ceramic dish on Yeosang’s desk leaving his hands, for the rare occasion, bear and unadorned. It often amazed him at how light it was without the added weight of privilege iced on his fingers. 

“What happened?!” Tzuyu greeted a solemn faced San. 

The boy waltzed through the room he shared with Yeosang, failing to acknowledge the hoard of people around him, and fell face first onto his bed. Tzuyu immediately rolled over and cuddled an unusually despondent San. There was a motherlike sentiment she felt toward the younger as a 3rd year in the clandestine department, having helping San through the tricky waters that were 2nd year disguises. 

San picked his head up and pouted, “No one died…” he whined before falling back down onto the blanket. 

“Oh, it didn’t work,” Chaeyoung cooed, from the base of Yeosang’s bed, curled up in a horrendously fluffy pink blanket. “I’m sorry, honey.” 

“Hey, I know what’ll cheer you up,” Yein smiled. 

“What?” San grumbled; his voice muffled as he spoke into the comforter. 

“Iridescent scratch guard!” Yein chirped, pulling a rainbow glass vial from her backpack. 

“I’ve been looking for that everywhere!” Yeosang shouted snatching the bottle from where he sat next to the other. “Oh my god, I love this stuff.” 

“San, sweetie,” a roughly accented deep male voice drifted over. “The Istanbul choke is a very difficult manoeuvre to master. It took me weeks.”

“Yeah,” Tzuyu coxed, arms and legs wrapping around San’s limp body. “No one can do it right in one day.” 

“That’s not what I’m upset about,” he answered. 

“What’s wrong then?” Yeji asked. 

San hadn’t even noticed the other was in the room. He picked his head up and saw Yeri laid flat on top of Yeji’s back as the other sprawled onto the carpet, almost completely hiding her from view. Mingi sat between Yeosang and Yein, his legs in a wide spread and his back slumped against Yeosang’s bed. Yein’s legs hung over his thigh, crossed at the ankles. 

San sighed and addressed the room. “I’ve decided I’m in love with Kanghyun.”

Yeri scrunched up her nose as Yeji shuffled to push the girl off of her. “I thought you were in love with Jungwoo,” she mused once Yeri was deposited onto the floor. 

“I’m over it,” San shrugged. “Besides, he didn’t like my knives.” 

“So Kanghyun…?” Tzuyu smirked, nudging the boy where the two lay across his bed, feet wrestling lazily in boredom. 

“I mean have you seen the boy!?” San replied enthusiastically, sitting up and nearly knocking Tzuyu off the mattress. 

“Who the fuck is allowed to just look like that?” Chaeyoung agreed.

“Is he the guy who Haknyeon introduced you to?” Yeosang asked. “The blonde one who wears a lot of smudged eyeliner?”

“He does not wear eyeliner!” Yein defended, leaning across Mingi to yell in the boy’s face. 

“No, he so does,” Yeji drawled, sucking on a bright red lollypop. “No one’s eyes just look like that,” she reasoned. 

Yein huffed, returning to her seat. “There is no way in hell Kanghyun wears eyeliner.” 

“Maybe Haknyeon wears eyeliner too,” Yeri teased which earned her a headlock from the elder. 

“Wasn’t he dating that girl who graduated?” Mingi mused. “The really pretty one in the econ department?”

“Who?” San pestered. “The one that Kiril swore was a robot?” 

Tzuyu flopped down to the mattress again and looked at San racking her memory. “Jinsoul?” 

“Yeah Jinsoul!” Mingi affirmed. 

“Oh,” San delated. “Maybe they are dating.” 

“Hey, it’s okay,” Yeosang put his hand on the other’s thigh in condolence. “We can kill her when we graduate. And we all know this is just because you’re repressing your feelings for-“ 

San slammed the other over the head with his pillow, rather viciously. “Like you’re one to talk.” 

“What?!” Yeosang balked. 

“I usually don’t knee my crushes in the face but whatever,” Chaeyoung drawled. “Maybe that’s just me.” 

“If he wasn’t such an asshole about the whole Jimin thing I wouldn’t have to,” Yeosang bit back. 

“Touché,” Chaeyoung saluted him. 

“Okay but honestly Brendon’s an idiot,” Yeri supplied, still braining Yeji’s hair as the other 2nd year sat on her lap. 

“Trust me, I know,” Mingi whined, stuffing marshmallows into his face, hair pulled back as Yein applied a face mask to him. 

“Stop eating those for one second,” she chided, wrestling the bag out of his large hands. 

“Aren’t you supposed to defend him or something?” Yeji asked. 

“What makes you say that?” Mingi asked. 

“Bro code?”

Mingi looked very confused and torn while replying, “But San is also a bro. How do I choose?” 

“I can help you with that,” Yeri winked. 

“I am NOT letting you blackmail more diplomatic children. You’re already banned from Jamaica and I wanted to go there for spring break,” Yeji chided her. 

“You’re banned from Jamaica?” Yeosang asked Yeri who nodded. “Me too!” he squealed earning a high five from the younger. 

“Put the fucking bag down, Mingi,” Yein grit out, still wrestling the boy’s marshmallows away. 

“No! This is my sad time food,” he whined. “You can’t deprive a boy of his sad time food!” ]

"Why the fuck are _you_ sad?"

"Solidarity? Are we not all just sad right now?"

Tzuyu and San simply lounged on the bed, giggling over the former’s phone like school girls, which, in fact they were and would not dispute the manner but instead agree with a little minor physical confrontation. 

Yeosang rolled his eyes and snatched the marshmallows away to Mingi’s incessant whining. Yeri stole the bag and crawled back to Yeji where the two huddled over it. 

“Do you think Jungwoo will be sad I have a new love interest?” San mused, more just to himself than anyone else. 

“No, but I think Kang will,” Yeosang teased. 

“Kang doesn’t deserve you,” Yein said, working on smoothing the mask over Mingi’s face, holding his head still with a cobra-like grip on his chin. The boy remained silent as per her many requests and chastisements. “Honestly,” she continued, “The kid’s an idiot.” 

“But he’s so pretty,” San whined. 

“Yeah, he’s so pretty,” Tzuyu joined. 

Yein finished the mask and began to wipe her hands on a small hand towel. “Honestly, I have no idea how the kid didn’t die in first year econ.” 

“Is econ really that hard?” Chaeyoung asked. 

“Yes,” Yeri and Yeji responded simultaneously, deadpan. 

“Why is Haknyeon friends with him if he’s such an idiot?” Yeosang inquired. “I mean, isn’t he pretty picky about his friends.” 

“He’s friends with San,” Yeji laughed which earned a smack from Yeri that diverged into the two of them wrestling. 

“And he’s dating Yein,” Chaeyoung chuckled. 

Yein plastered on a frighteningly fake smile that stretched taught across her cheeks. “And yet still no one wants to date you,” she joked back. “It’s just so funny.”  
“You know it really is. Maybe my standards are just too high,” Chaeyoung smiled. 

“Well,” Mingi huffed, standing up. “I have to go mail off my zingers for the Zurich summit this weekend. I have to hand them into the cyber department by Friday so they can rig the speech prompters.”

San’s eyes widened. “That’s this Friday?!” 

Mingi nodded and a curl fell out from the back of his hair, clearly having been missed by Yein when she had attempted to wrestle his thick onyx locks into them and miserably failed. She had attempted to wretch the thing from his head and eventually gave up, letting it nestle into a tangle at the nape of his neck and having resigned herself to just leaving it there forever. 

“FUCK I THOUGHT THAT WAS NEXT FRIDAY?! I HAVEN’T EVEN STARTED!” San screamed and vaulted himself out of bed, pyjamas pants and slippers accessorized with a thick pea coat and twirling a scarf around his neck about 5 times frantically after he stuffed his bag with approximately a million loose pages of paper adorned with pink and blue scribbles. 

He grabbed a zoned out Mingi’s arm - headband, face full of sea-green foam, and all – and commandeered the boy, steering the other out of the room with him. The elder’s soft bunny slippers barely managed to stay on his feet as he was hauled away from the group. 

“Does that mean we’re done?” Yeri asked the four who remained. 

“Yeah I suppose, it’s time to call it a night,” Chaeyoung agreed, gathering her belongings which sprawled on the ground around her. 

They all began to collect their things: pillows and cleansers nail varnishes and blankets. 

“Wait,” Yeosang reached out to Yein, grabbing her hand. “Can you stay for a bit?” 

“I’ll walk the girls back to their rooms,” Chaeyoung nodded to the two and they filed out of the room amidst faint chatter, arms spilling over with loose bottles and fabrics hanging off their arms. 

“I called Jimin the other day.”

“Oh no,” Yein breathed out before she could stop herself. “I didn’t mean ‘oh no’,” she tried to backtrack. “I just meant like ‘oh… no’. No wait that doesn’t sound right.” 

“It’s okay,” Yeosang stopped her. “It went… well.”

“Alright,” Yein responded. “That’s … good?”

Yeosang sighed. “Yeah. Yeah I guess it’s good. I mean it wasn’t bad or anything.” 

Yein sat down next to her friend and pulled her knees to her chest with a tense smile. 

“Gosh, why is this so awkward?” Yeosang groaned in the tense silence. 

“Because it’s been a while. It’s always going to be awkward for you, I think. Can I ask why you called him?”

“I had a fight with Yunho,” Yeosang mumbled staring down at his fingers as they played with carpet underneath them, carding through the strands of fluff, twisting and pulling anxiously. 

“He knows about Jimin?”

“Not really.”

Yein gave him a sympathetic look. “You didn’t tell him? Yeosang you really should. I don't even know the full story but I do think he ought to know.”

Yeosang muttered something in response, the words getting lost in the mess of carpet as they tumbled out of his mouth and into his fidgeting hands. 

“What?” Yein asked leaning toward the boy.

“I don’t wanna…” he said louder. 

“I don’t think that matters. He deserves to know and you know that.” 

“I do,” Yeosang acquiesced looking up and meeting her gaze. “I do know.” 

“Just because it isn’t easy doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.” 

“Shut up, Confucius,” Yeosang grumbled back. 

“It was more of an Epicurus but okay.”


	19. When Faced With A Load of Hullaballoo

As Seonghwa sat waiting for supplies at the medical pharmacy desk on an impossibly slow Wednesday afternoon, Wooyoung wandered by, completely immersed in his own world, dancing to the blaring sound of music from his headphones. The elder had been sitting there for the better part of an hour waiting to hear back about a shipment of Calmodulin he had gotten approved over a week ago for his independent research. He was synthesizing a highly resistant facultative anaerobe of bacillus anthracis, but he ran out of the goddamn messenger protein for his anthrax lethal factor. 

Wooyoung stopped mid-spin as his eyes landed on a very irked Seonghwa sitting on the hard bench in front of the pharmacy. The boy pulled out his headphones, letting them dangle over the tops of his ears and swing in the air. Seonghwa now recognized the music as it more clearly rang out in the deafly quiet hallway. 

“I thought you didn’t like the Ramones??”

“Oh, I didn’t even listen to them before that day you got super mad me. They’re pretty good actually.” 

“I literally hate you. Where are you even going?”

“Hell!” Wooyoung beamed at him in excitement. 

Seonghwa’s shoulder feel in an exhausted despondence. “Why are you like this?” he breathed out softly. 

“Wanna come?” Wooyoung chirped. 

“No. No, I don’t.” Seonghwa shook his head in a mix of annoyance, dejection, and utter confusion. “Every day I spend with you is already enough.” 

“You look stressed,” Wooyoung mused. “Can I get you a drink?”

"It’s 3 in the afternoon,” Seonghwa countered. 

“Yeah?”

“You know what?” Seonghwa gave up. “Sure.” 

“I’m no wurp; I enjoy a good jorum of skee, but that bloody idiot was bleeding wooden nickels,” Seonghwa complained across the table at Wooyoung once they were seated in the wood panelled smoking lounge beneath the dining hall. 

It was one of the oldest and most well kept spaces on the island, having been erected in the 1850s in the fashion of Crimean war era British estates. Seonghwa looked right at home, nursing his third a gin and tonic. Wooyoung sat across from the other in a dark alcove, staring back at him, utterly lost and yet somehow transfixed. For a few seconds Wooyoung began to wonder if his vocabular had begun to slip, but as he listened and catalogued the wisps of conversation swirling around them, he was sure that wasn’t the case at all. Seonghwa was… well, he was always an enigma, an anomaly. It was rather remarkable he knew anything about him. 

Two years later and he still didn’t even know his last name, let alone his upbringing or family. It was by a rather unfortunate circumstance Wooyoung knew what the boy’s blood type was, and he was still the only one among their friends who had been (situationally) privileged to carry that information. Wooyoung truly and irrevocably believed that had Seonghwa been physically able to change his type after being discovered, he absolutely would have. And for all he knew, maybe it was possible. Sean was awfully capable in matters related to blood. 

“I mean he was zozzled half-seas over on the giggle water and pulling a Daniel Boon like a goddamn Reuben,” the elder rambled. 

“Trill?” Wooyoung tried to respond, but Seonghwa wasn’t even listening, continuing to one-sidedly rant. 

Some days, as Seonghwa poured over his research with a keen eye and tasselled loafers, sweater tied loosely around his shoulders and a money clip of highly complex key cards to the labs, Wooyoung wondered if time travel was perhaps already well in use. It was hard to believe otherwise the smooth talking, confusedly kempt, and obsoletely mannered boy in front of him was born in 1998 and not 1918. 

“Hundo P, fam” Wooyoung nodded as the med student continued to detail whatever it was he was very passionately discussing at the moment. 

There had been a party last night. Two inseparable fourth years everyone confused with each other had hosted it. Well Changmin had hosted it and Chanhee had stood in the corner and single-handedly diminished the liquid inside the ostentatiously ornamented sterling silver punchbowl. Wooyoung had deduced the other was - okay maybe it was educated guess of approximately 67% - speaking about, perhaps lamenting, some sort of events which had occurred at said festivity. 

He knew Dongmyeong and Cya had accidentally stabbed Harin in the back while he was passed out on the sofa. Yes, Cya had pushed a tipsy Jakub toward the sleeping boy and yes, Dongmyeong had only put his weapon clad hands out to catch himself, but, well, a knife was a knife no matter the intention. It certainly wasn’t the first time those two had mistakenly stabbed someone either.

“And he was with this choice bit of calico, a real Sheba. But, honestly, bank’s closed! No one wants to see him getting cash.” 

Wooyoung had no idea about what or whom Seonghwa was even mentioning. He recalled briefly seeing Keonhee and Doyeon, but no exchanging of funds between the two. Why was Seonghwa angry about that anyways? Plenty of money laundering and gambling normally went on at Genius. 

“That’s some straight up dank ass finesse,” he chose to answer, pretending to understand. “That’s real Gucci.” 

“What the FUCK are you talking about?!” Seonghwa yelled at the younger. “No one knows what you’re saying!” 

As Seonghwa looked at him with a stone faced expression, Wooyoung raised a hand, folding his pointer finger under the middle and placing his thumb beside in a miniature shaka brah motion. 

“Yeet?” Wooyoung softly questioned back, swivelling his hand. 

Somehow they became locked in a tense battle of wills, staring silently into each other’s eyes, waiting for one to break. It felt as if a noose was nestled against Wooyoung’s throat and he swallowed thickly around the anxious ties he found himself bound with in that moment. The clock on the wall ticked, and ticked, and ticked, inching past the seconds as the two boys sat in a stunned stillness that weighed down upon them like a concrete slab. 

“If you promise to never do that again,” Seonghwa said very slowly after 30 seconds, as if the words were painful as they lifted from his tongue. “I will not suffocate you in your sleep tonight.” 

“What about tomorrow night?” 

Seonghwa closed his eyes and heaved out a laboured breathe that Wooyoung could taste the rage in. The elder boy raised both his hands in clasped fists, knuckles tight and nails digging into the skin. 

‘I’m finna go,’ Wooyoung mouthed sheepishly at the other once the elder had opened his eyes. 

Seonghwa nodded his tight lipped smile that always seemed to grace his face within the time it took a short conversation to elapse between the two and pointed at the door, his hand shooting out like an arrow. Wooyoung, so very graciously, obeyed his elder and silently escaped the room and the impending wrath an annoyed Seonghwa, who, quite frankly, had a most tenacious ferocity in the event of extreme exasperation and sleep deprivation alike. It was remarkable and truly unparalleled by another student at the Factory. 

A body landed heavily in the chair Wooyoung had just vacated about a minute ago. Without looking up, Seonghwa grunted and furrowed his brow. 

“Leave,” he ordered in a breath that contained unadulterated rage. 

“Sorry,” Yunho’s voice mocked back at him, moving to get up again. 

“Ah, not you,” Seonghwa waved him off. “Thought it was the idiot.” 

“Nah, I passed him on my way in.” 

Seonghwa nodded. “So what’s up?” he asked. 

“Dude, I’m really nervous,” Yunho answered, suddenly very serious. “Jongho has been talking an awful lot about this whole ‘imminent destruction of innocent lives’ thing and he seems really into it.”

‘Imminent destruction of human lives’ he put into air quotes and rolled his eyes at as he said it. 

“It’s fine,” Seonghwa assured him nonchalantly. “I’m sure it’s just a phase or something. He’ll get over it.”

“No really. I am genuinely worried about him.” 

“You can’t seriously think that kid honestly believes in that garbage, can you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I kind of do.”

Seonghwa raised his eyebrow sceptically. “This isn’t you trying to distract yourself from the whole Yeosang thing?”

“What whole Yeosang thing?”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“Okay fine. There’s a Yeosang thing,” Yunho gave in, throwing his hands in the air. “But I swear this isn’t about that.” 

“And it’s not about Jimin?”

Yunho shot the elder a death glare. “I do not EVER, under any circumstances, want to hear that name again.” 

Seonghwa clicked his tongue before responding, “Whatever.” 

“But Jongho…”

“Jongho…?”

“He’s been really… I don’t know ‘moral’ lately?”

Seonghwa hummed. 

“Could you at least pretend to care?” Yunho chided. 

“I could. I chose not to.” 

“Fine, I’m going to Hongjoong,” Yunho huffed. 

“No,” Seonghwa blurted, immediately stopping the other. “He’s really stressed about his independent study right now. I’ll help. Just don’t annoy him.”

“You do care,” Yunho cooed. 

“I could also just paralyze you with an inhibitor I have in my bag for rainy days.” 

Yunho frowned and pointed to window. Outside the sun shone so brightly it had begun to melt bits of the icicles hanging from the roof and the snow which sat heavy on tree branches. 

“Looks like rain to me,” Seonghwa drawled, completely serious. 

“Fine,” Yunho whined, sitting back down. “This isn’t for you,” he shot across the table. “This is because I like Hongjoong.” 

“Everyone likes Hongjoong. You’re not special.” 

“I thought you were supposed to be helping me,” Yunho grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest. 

“God, you’re such a baby. But yes, I will help you with your non-existent problem instead of your blatantly obvious one.” 

“I don’t want to deal with that one.”

“Fine by me,” Seonghwa surrendered. 

“Now, Jongho. Should I or should I not try to convince him that morality is bust, and he can’t save a world that’s already destroying itself?”

Seonghwa leaned back in his chair. “When you say it like that it seems pretty simple.” 

“So yes?”

A strange expression passed over the other’s face.

“No?” Yunho tried interpreting. 

“Kid’s not that simple,” Seonghwa answered. “That’s why I like him. He’s a puzzle. I don’t think we can do any convincing he doesn’t want to hear.” 

Yunho ran his hands down over his face. “Talking to you gives me more problems.” 

“I never said I would solve your problems for you.” 

“YOU SAID YOU WOULD HELP!” Yunho fumed. 

“Exactly,” Seonghwa shrugged. “I never said I was good at it.”


	20. Appeasement and Entanglement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's some Xiaojun and Yuqi being sassy cause why not - also more dumb mingi and hendery
> 
> also is anyone reading and liking this?

Hongjoong had no idea what was going on at the current moment no idea how he had found himself wedged in the confines of the school’s mechanical storage room alongside a frustrated Jongho, why he didn’t know, and a provoking Wooyoung, which Hongjoong had come to recognize was the boy’s constant state. He couldn’t recall how he had arrived at the storage room, seated on a fraying light blue couch with screws sticking out of it and feet propped before him on an upended paint bucket. He tuned into the conversation, or more perhaps aptly named an argument, as he read quietly though a small journal stuffed with post its and papers resting on his lap.

“Give me at least one good reason why I should help you,” Wooyoung challenged with a playful grin. 

Jongho stood silent, racking his brain, failing to come up with any valid answer to give and choosing to remain quiet. 

“Really? Nothing?” Wooyoung asked. “Come on! You’re taking Bribery and Coercion.” 

“Because you have nothing better to do?” Jongho tried. 

“I resent that and it’s wrong. I could be playing Zelda right now,” he paused. “I want to be playing Zelda right now,” he corrected. 

“Because...” Jongho struggled for words. “Because it’s the right thing to do?” 

Wooyoung stared at him with an unimpressed frown. 

“Jongho, dude, just give it up already. Why do you think I give a fuck about the ‘the right thing’? I would be here if I did. You really need to get over it.” 

“Get over it?”

“Yeah, just… I don’t know. Go stab someone or something,” the second year offered. 

“I can’t do it! I can’t destroy the world! I can’t kill people!”

“Technically, you’ve already killed two people,” Wooyoung interjected. 

“Two?” Hongjoong gaped, finally drawn away from his book and gazing wide-eyed up at the two younger boys. “I thought he only killed Dr. P?”

“That wasn’t even my fault!” Jongho yelled back. 

“Oh, he didn’t tell you about Jack?” Wooyoung threw out offhandedly. 

Hongjoong shook his head. “Who the hell is Jack?” 

“Nice kid. Good engineer,” Wooyoung hummed thoughtfully. “ _Really good_ nuclear physicist,” he emphasized. 

“That also wasn’t my fault! I didn’t do it!” Jongho defended, pointing his finger at Wooyoung. “I do not take responsibility for that!” 

Wooyoung shrugged. “Kind hard to not take responsibility when you killed him, buddy.” 

“What did he do?” Hongjoong asked, completely being ignored by the other two who were locked into a fervent argument about the moral character of their youngest friend. 

“Jack was already in the vat when I got there,” Jongho continued. “There’s probably cameras. Just check the-”

Wooyoung laughed in the younger boy’s face. “Jack doesn’t even take engineering. Why would he be near the uranium enricher?” 

“I don’t know! Go ask him!” Jongho yelled back. 

Wooyoung raised his arms in a confused shrug. “You killed him!”

“I didn’t kill him!” 

“JONGHO DID YOU OR DID YOU NOT KILL JACK?” Hongjoong shouted over them, quieting the two down momentarily. 

“No!” he bellowed just as Wooyoung yelled “Yes!” 

Hongjoong and Jongho both looked to Wooyoung, one in contemptuous fury and the other in exasperation. 

“Pushed him into the uranium enricher he did,” Wooyoung added. 

“No, I didn’t!” Jongho yelled, hitting Wooyoung on the arm. 

“Hey, no need to get physical,” the second year pouted.

“Wooyoung…” Hongjoong sighed. “I’ve seen you saw a kid’s foot off. Just please shut up for once.” 

“I didn’t kill, Jack,” Jongho pouted at Hongjoong. “It was an accident.” 

“Look, I don’t really care if you meant to or not, but what’s all this business about running away?” 

Jongho opened his mouth to deny it before Hongjoong held up his hand. 

“Seonghwa already told me you went to him the other day. And it’s not like I’m trying to stop you or anything but just... think it through, okay?”

“If it makes you feel any better, I killed 8 people my first year.”

Hongjoong and Jongho simultaneously glared at Wooyoung. 

“At least one of them, statistically, had to be an accident, right?”

Hongjoong pinched the bridge of his nose with a huff. “That’s not – that’s not how that works, Wooyoung.” 

“I’m not like you guys,” Jongho whined. 

“Jongho, can I ask you a question?” Hongjoong asked softly. 

The boy nodded numbly. 

“Why did you come to school here?” 

“I had to.” 

Hongjoong wrinkled his brow in confusion. “Why?” 

“I’m a legacy kid,” he droned. “Same as the rest of you. I never had a choice.” 

"You didn’t have to come.” 

“NOT COME! Can you imagine what my parents would have done to me if I hadn’t come?! They would have FUCKING DISOWNED ME!” 

“Jongho-” Hongjoong tried to consul the boy. 

“They were so proud when was invited, and when I applied, and when I got in and I couldn’t just not come here,’ Jongho rambled. “Can you imagine? The family disgrace!” 

“THEN LEAVE GODDAMMIT!” Wooyoung yelled. “You don’t have to stay here, Jongho. I like you. I really do. And if you’re not happy, you shouldn’t just suck it up. Look,” he calmed down. “I’ve known plenty of kids who have died, and they all wanted to be here. You’re gonna get hurt.” 

Jongho locked eyes with him silently, his lip shaking in anger, hands balled into fists at his side.  
“Fine! You know what? FUCK IT!” 

The door slammed shut. Hongjoong and Wooyoung sat in the silence for a moment before the younger turned to the cyber major. 

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked Hongjoong. 

“Can I ask you a question?”

“I don’t really know Jongho that well but go ahead,” Wooyoung shrugged. 

Hongjoong levelled him with a genuinely puzzled look. “How did I get in here?” 

Wooyoung matched Hongjoong’s expression and leaned forward toward the elder boy. “When was the last time you slept?” he asked, putting a hand on Hongjoong’s shoulder. 

“I genuinely have no idea.” 

“I’ll call Seonghwa,” Wooyoung said softly. 

“Yeah,” Hongjoong blinked back at him sluggishly. “Good idea.”

On the way to Hongjoong’s room, they passed an incredibly sleepy Mingi and Hendery, barely standing upright on their feet. 

“What’s wrong with you two?” Wooyoung asked. 

They blinked slowly at his question, taking an exceptionally long amount of time to even process that had been addressed let alone asked something. 

“There were elections in Brazil last night,” Mingi answer. “… This morning?” he turned to Hendery in question who shrugged. “Oh heck, I don’t know it was like 2 am here.” 

Wooyoung chuckled softly. “Did you have to watch it in real time?”

“Yeah, we’re not slackers,” Hendery slurred, sleep deprived. “It was over by 3 but we drank too much red bull beforehand and never really went to bed.”

“And how many classes did you miss this morning?”

Mingi scratched his head. “I don’t know like two. Why?” 

Wooyoung shook his head slightly. “Never mind. Carry on. I gotta put dad to bed.” 

“Night dad,” Mingi smiled at Hongjoong. 

“Not your dad!” the other called back as Wooyoung shuffled him away. 

Mingi and Hendery then continued to the main library on campus, tucked between the triangle of the clandestine, government, and economics buildings. On the second floor, in the back corner near the books on the hydrogen and atom bombs, amidst pencil and pen sketches of the Marshall islands carved into the shelves, sat Xiaojun and Yuqi. 

Xiaojun and Yuqi were… unlikely friends. Xiaojun was a third year medical student with a cold disposition and Yuqi was a vivacious economics student in the same year. She met Xiaojun through Yunho at the end of their first semester at Genius, as she was dating one of his friends Lucas. Somehow, confusing everyone and even themselves, the two became fast friends. 

Xiaojun was lounging next to Yuqi and the two were conversing quickly in a language neither Mingi nor Hendery understood. The boy’s strong jaw and thick eyebrows placed over dark piercing eyes were juxtaposing to the small demure way he curled against the smaller girl, her curly strawberry blonde hair frazzled in every direction and tickling his face tucked up under her chin. They fired away strange sounds at each other that resembled Arabic but neither of the two bleary eyed government majors could quite place the words.

Mingi took a shot in the dark and threw out a greeting in Pashto, trying to get their attention but as soon as the last syllable left his mouth, they were wiping their heads up to glare at him. 

“That’s offensive,” Yuqi quipped back in English. 

“Yeah. We were speaking Northern Hindko you presumptive ass,” Xiaojun backed her up. 

Mingi held up his hands in defence and apologized, easing his body onto the floor where he sat slumped against the bookshelf. He breathed out slowly once he was stationary and cracked his neck in both directions. 

“Russian and French are probably closer related than Hindko and Pashto. They’re completely different,” Yuqi continued with all the ferocity of a kitten written on her face despite possessing an amazing amount of torque in her high kicks. 

“Please don’t attack me right now, I think I can smell colours,” Mingi pleaded, spilling further towards the floor as time passed. 

“We haven’t slept since like 6 am yesterday,” Hendery added. 

“That’s a lazy excuse for not brushing up on your geo-situational linguistics and you know it,” Yuqi sassed. 

Hendery huffed as he sat down in the chair across from them, body almost tumbling into it in exhaustion. “I’m going to buy one of those new microscopic drones and fly it right into your brain.” 

“How do you know about that?” Xiaojun asked. 

“Someone posted about it on dark twitter last night.” He paused looking over to Mingi whose eyes were closed peacefully as he lay on the carpet of the library. “Well, it was like 4 am but you know what I mean,” Hendery yawned. 

“You’re on dark twitter?” Yuqi seemed sceptical. 

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Cause it’s an exclusive guarded secret?” she probed. 

“And my brother invented it?” Hendery boasted. 

“Are you telling me you can get me on dark twitter?” she asked excitedly. “Like really actually? Cause there’s this rumour that one guy is selling bitcoin counterfeits and I am so into that shit.” 

Hendery closed his eyes and screwed them shut at her outburst. “You are being way too load right now.”

“I think I’m dying,” Mingi added from the floor. “Xiaojun, am I dying?”

“How would I know?” the boy shrugged. “I’m not a doctor.” 

“You’re a medical major,” Hendery replied. 

“So?” 

“So is he dying?”

“Well, how much red bull did you guys drink?” Xiaojun asked. 

Hendery pensively looked into the distance for a second, folding down fingers on his hand. When he reached the end of his second he looked back at Xiaojun and said, “like 30 cans.” 

“Each?” Yuqi gasped, looking down at Mingi as if he really was just a corpse lying there. 

“Yeah. Why?”

“You two are idiots,” Xiaojun sighed. 

“We can’t all be sensitive medics like you,” Hendery replied. 

“You think I’m sensitive?”

“You think he’s sensitive?” Yuqi repeated. 

“Yeah. You and Seonghwa. Juyeon too. Bunch of emotional babies, you lot. Oh my god, and Jisung,” Hendery added, amazed he forgot the younger boy. 

“Jisung doesn’t count! He cried like three times a day!” Xiaojun yelled. 

Yuqi clapped a hand over the boy’s mouth. He raised an eyebrow at her to which she replied, “We’re in a library, Jun.”

Hendery kicked Mingi as Xiaojun quieted down. The boy didn’t flinch and continued to lay, still as a log, upon the floor. He exchanged a glance with Xiaojun and Yuqi, receiving a nod from Yuqi and kicking the unresponsive body again. 

“Is he actually dead?” Yuqi breathed out. 

“I don’t know maybe,” Xiaojun shrugged. “It’s a miracle he had it this far anyway.”


	21. Winsom Wily Ways

Mingi was struggling with to open the window of the study room they had all gathered in that night. He and San had a test which needed studying for - Yunho had joined because he was lonely while fighting with Yeosang, Hideo had joined because Seonghwa had dragged him out of the dim lab and forced him into public, Wooyoung had tagged along because he liked to annoy Seonghwa, and Yeosang had eventually wandered in when he found out they were all hanging out without him. 

“Just push harder,” Wooyoung told Mingi. “Put some effort into it.” 

The other nodded with determination and turned back to the window, which was very clearly visibly latched closed on the top. He grunted and pushed harder against the wooden sill, straining his muscles against the pane. Wooyoung watched on in amusement before Mingi eventually gave up and slumped back into his seat. 

“What do you think would happen if I injected hydrochloric acid inside of a human body?” Yeosang said out loud to no one in particular. 

Hideo looked over at him. “You are not throwing Mingi in hydrochloric acid."

“Who says it would be me?” Mingi asked them offended, looking away from the whiteboard he was pouring over with Yunho and San. 

“He was right,” Yeosang responded. 

“Are you even really friends with us?”

Yeosang reeled at the question. “You’re asking me and not Mr. emotionally constipated over there?” he questioned pointing at Seonghwa who quirked his eyebrow but said nothing in return. 

“Yeosang, name one thing about me you know,” Daemon said. 

“That’s not fair, we weren’t even friends until last year!” he defended. 

“Okay, Wooyoung. You’ve known him the longest. Name one thing about Wooyoung,” Hideo interrupted.

“Uh-“ he stammered. 

“Yeosang!” Wooyoung yelled at him in surprise. “What the heck?”

“When’s his birthday?” Mingi pressed him. 

“…”

Wooyoung’s mouth dropped. “Dude, seriously?!” 

“Shut up! Give me a second!” Yeosang yelled. 

“We’ve known each other for like 6 years!” 

“You seriously don’t know,” Mingi laughed. 

“Leave him alone,” San inserted, red marker in one hand and green in another, both uncapped and drawing dangerously near to Yunho’s white button down. “I bet you don’t even know.”

“It’s uh- March 9th?” Mingi tied. 

“It’s NOVEMBER 26TH, YOU IDIOT!” Wooyoung yelled back. “I’m done with you posers. Hey Seonghwa, can I-”

“Absolutely not,” the voice barked back before Wooyoung could even finish his question. 

“OH COME ON!”

“I had a wonderful dream the other night,” Seonghwa locked eyes with Wooyoung. “You were dead,” he smiled. 

“You didn’t even listen to what I was going to say!” 

“I’m psychic. I already know what you’re going to say is stupid.” 

“All I wanted to ask was if I could go save Jongho…” the boy grumbled. 

“What now?” Seonghwa perked up. 

“There’s a storm tonight and I was worried about him but never mind,” he threw his arms out. “But, go off I guess. More fake friends. You all suck.” 

“Why would Jongho be unsafe in a storm?” 

Wooyoung looked confused for a moment. “He took a boat…”

Seonghwa motioned for the other to continue. 

“To escape the school…” Wooyoung continued slowly. 

They watched as Seonghwa’s face morphed from one of puzzlement to one of annoyed rage. “I TOLD HIM NOT TO DO THAT!” 

“The kid’s too idealistic for his own good,” Yunho hummed. 

“What if he gets lost?” Hideo asked. 

Seonghwa groaned deeply in his chest. “No. Nope. I do not care.” 

“What if he drowns?” San volunteered. 

“Ugh, goddammit!” Seonghwa seethed. “Fucking-”

Yeosang turned to Mingi, resting his head on the taller boy’s shoulder and pointedly ignoring the look Yunho shot him. “Isn’t it supposed to snow?”

“Nah. I think that’s tomorrow night,” Mingi mumbled back. 

“This goddamn child- this fucking idiot,” Seonghwa rambled, racking his hands through his hair. “Fuck!! We gotta go get him, don’t we?” 

“Yeah,” Yunho sighed. “Yeah we do.” 

“But… test,” San argued. 

“Yeah… test,” Mingi parroted. 

“You’ll be fine,” Hideo assured them. “It’s not like you’re not both failing or anything.” 

The 7 of them stood, huddled behind the stone pillars next to the docks. San and Hideo shivered slightly in the rain while Seonghwa merely stood there, long blonde hair dripping over his face, as if it was perfectly normal weather outside. 

“What do we do about the guard?” Hideo asked

“I have an mini Uzi back in my locker,” Wooyoung offered. 

“You want the whole bloody school to find us,” Seonghwa chastised, clipping the boy on the back of the head. 

“I have darts,” Yeosang added. 

“No you don’t,” Yunho corrected. “You used the last one two days ago on Keonhee when he checked the book you wanted out of the library.” 

“Oh wow. So you do know everything about me. Not like I need any privacy or anything. Might as well just give you Jimin’s social security number,” Yeosang ranted. 

“Now is really not the time,” Hideo sighed. 

While they were all arguing, Mingi watched as San stood up and waltzed over to the man standing outside the boathouse. Once he made it to the side of the shed he looked back to the others,  
all oblivious save Mingi who gave him an encouraging salute with a smile. San suddenly popped up behind the guard and wrapped his arms around his neck. The man clawed at him, scratching into the skin and leaving long red marks on San’s forearms. He flung his legs out beneath him, kicking frantically about. One of his feet made contact with San’s shin and he hurled it back towards the boy’s leg with an animalistic grunt. San faltered slightly in his stance, dropping the two of them into the sand, and ended up straddling the man’s stomach. 

“You fucker,” he grit out, squeezing even tighter and slamming the man’s head into the ground. 

He flailed and screamed, spit flying from his mouth. San readjusted himself, letting go of the man’s neck momentarily as he sat up on his knees, hovering over him. San pushed the man over, shoving his face into the rocky beach and roughly grabbed his hair, pulling the man’s head up as he sat on his back. 

The boy brought his right arm up around the guard’s neck, grabbing his opposite bicep, thumb on the underside tracing the tricep. The left arm doubled over on top and his hand bracketed against his right shoulder blade, the man’s head caught in between the small space. San pulled harshly on his own shoulder with his left hand, bracketing the man’s windpipe against the knuckles of his right hand which sat inside the choke hold along the other’s throat. The man struggled for a few second more before limp. San’s chest heaved at the exertion and he dropped his head onto the sand. 

“The Istanbul!” Mingi clapped, practically bouncing with excitement and running out to greet him, closely followed by the others. “I’m so proud of you!” 

“We good?” San asked, standing and dusting off his legs. 

Hideo just smiled a wide toothy grin and have him a thumbs up, dropping it down for a moment before raising both his thumbs next to each other. San started bobbing his head in the air and swinging his hips with a similar grin, hands above his head moving in circles and snapping ever so often. 

“Are you- are you victory dancing?” 

San simply laughed and answered a very amused Yunho by pulling him to join which the other did with remarkably little convincing. They swung around in the sand, laughing. Eventually Mingi joined, and the Wooyoung pulling Yeosang behind him. Seonghwa and Hideo stood with fond expression watching them reveal, leaping over the dead man at their feet. Yunho came sprinting over a second later and tackled Hideo into the sand with an outrageous howl and the two went careening into the water with a load yelp and a splash. The rain continued to beat down upon them, soaking them to their core, but they needed not the shelter or the warmth of the school sitting bright upon the hill. It was a perfect moment, messily in shambles and drenched beyond repair, but perfect, nonetheless. 

The boat ride was a different story. From the one left in the boathouse, they deduced Jongho had only taken out a small zodiac into the storm, which was, on the whole, idiotic. Never in their lives and any of them been in a search party, or rather cared enough to be involved. Luckily, Yunho and Mingi both knew how to sail and pilot small boats which was not that surprising to any of them, but amazingly they were reminded of the only crippling weakness Kang Yeosang possessed: he was terrified of the ocean. 

They piled into a small passenger hydrofoil with enough inside space to seat the seven of them, leaving Yunho to the wheel after a remark from Seonghwa that he was most certainly entering any vehicle operated by Mingi under any circumstances. Mingi shrugged and took it in stride. Hideo had tracked the missing boat from the registry in the school’s records. Honestly, more of the private information from the Factory was ridiculously easy to hack. Within a good hour, of pelting rain and choppy waves, bickering and banter, they came upon a dark object on their horizon line. It bobbed violently in the waves, swirling around chaotically in the torment of the waves. Yeosang gripped the seat beneath him until his knuckles turned white and sewed his eyes shut. 

Yunho came upon the small motorboat and Seonghwa rushed out to meet the poor kid, sopping wet and shaken to his core at the storm. Seonghwa extended his hand, foot against the starboard railing, astride the ship like a German Romantic, hair a frenzy and body strong against the elements. He looked like a prince, strong eyebrows and tousled, rugged shirt whipping in the blowing wind about his waist. The man perched there, with a lazy smile dusting his face, the quirk of his lip heightened ever so slightly in a cocky grin. 

“Ride or die, Jongho,” he said with a wink. 

Just like that the spell was broken. The door to the cabin sat thrown open behind him and San and Mingi were keeled over, peeling laughter from their lips. Yunho’s gut rumbled with amusement, but he stuffed down the scoffs of laughter threatening to escape. Yeosang and Wooyoung failed terribly, the former giggling his head off and the latter almost incapacitated.

"Did you... did you do that on purpose?" Hideo chocked out amidst a blaze of hilarity. 

“What are you talking about?” Seonghwa cocked his head. 

The group continued to laugh, mirth and haggard harassment. Jongho sat stunned in the small, leaking row boat, not bothering to bail the water anymore and simply staring at the medical student. 

"Did you seriously just say that?"

“What?” Seonghwa asked again, completely oblivious. “Ride or die?” 

"Yeah. That. Do you even know what that means?" Hideo goaded him, shoulders shaking with gentle laughs. 

Seonghwa shrugged indignantly, throwing his hands in the air. “It means get in the boat or you fucking die,” he bit back entirely serious. “That's what it fucking means.” 

"I just- You know what, never mind." 

“No. Why are they laughing? Why is it funny?”

“Guys, can I get in the goddamn boat?” Jongho whimpered up at them, exhausted, soaked, and very impatient at the present moment. 

“RIDE- R-RIDE” Wooyoung sputtered out, buckling over in giggles and collapsing to the deck of the ship. 

“OR DIE!” San yelled back in his face before joining the boy on the floor. 

Seonghwa grunted as he hauled Jongho’s body abroad the larger boat, arm straining to carry the full wight of the boy but collecting him, nonetheless. The elder boy kept grumbling things like ‘This does not mean I care’ and ‘I’m here because you’re a goddamn imbecile’ but Jongho felt loved, nonetheless. Seonghwa turned around and sighed at the children in a mess around them.  
“In the name of all that is holy, shut the fuck up.” 

"So does this not apply to any of us hell ridden bastards or..." Yunho started to tease from the wheel, Mingi clapping him on the back with a shit eating grin. 

“I reiterate my earlier statement,” Seonghwa droned. 

"Which is?" 

“Shut the fuck up,” he replied and walked back to the wheel. 

“How’d you get out?” Yeosang asked Jongho once he was seated next to him in the warm, cosy cabin, swaddled in a large blue towel. 

“I stole a boat.” 

“No, not that,” he clarified. “I mean how’d you get past the guards at the boat house?” 

“Guards? There was only one,” Jongho answered confused. “I guess the other dude was taking or break or something.” 

“Yes, but how did you make it past him?” Yunho implored on Yeosang’s behalf. 

“I just shot him.” 

“That seems incredibly counterproductive, moral boy,” San scoffed. 

“You’re just mad you didn’t think of that,” Mingi teased, squishing the boy’s cheeks between his palms.

“It’s lazy,” he grit out, swatting Mingi’s hands away. “And unimaginative.” 

“Stop being a jealous baby, Sannie” Mingi said, wrapping his long limbs around San’s smaller figure like an overenthusiastic octopus. 

“I’m not jealous, but I am an asshole,” he replied. “I do so apologize if I have engaged in any activity to the contrary.” 

“Have I ever told you how much I love you?’ Yeosang asked Hideo quietly from the side, hand clutching his desperately as he stared out at the dark night falling over the tumultuous ocean crashes. 

“I know you’re scared but I’m not giving you my cookie.” 

“I fucking hate you,” he responded with a pout, curling deeper into the seat and not letting go of Hongjoong’s hand.


	22. Two Truths But A Million Left Unsaid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ugh the angst is palpable guys
> 
> also do you want all the russian translations or are y’all okay?

Yunho handed over piloting duties to Mingi, much to the chagrin of everyone on board the coat but mostly Yeosang who insisted that no it was not the storm which made them rock frantically, it was Mingi’s inferior driving skills. Yunho smiled at the indirect compliment and so Yeosang threw his shoe at the boy. What a wonderful idea it had been to confine two quarrelling teenagers in a small space for hours on end without the promise of resolution. 

“Okay am I super out of the loop on this one?” Yunho suddenly threw out to the group. “Because I have literally no idea what’s going on?”

The boat swayed to and fro harshly in the storm. Yeosang had curled himself up into Yunho’s chest and the boy protectively wrapped his arms around the other. Yeosang begrudgingly cowered his face into Yunho’s chest, still refusing to acknowledge him which was increasingly harder as waves grew stronger in the night and his anxiety with them. They were still very much fighting had not uttered a word to each other since coming aboard but no circumstance could negate the fact that a scared Yeosang, as unusual and perplexing as it was, looked like a drowned kitten and it tugged on Yunho’s heartstrings. 

“Is this not a field trip?” Mingi asked. 

“What? Why would this be field trip?” Seonghwa questioned. 

Mingi shrugged. “I thought they might have changed the curriculum.” 

“Hello, yes,” San interrupted, raised his hand in the air and waving it. “I also don’t know what I’m doing here.” 

“Lord, do I wish I wasn’t,” Seonghwa sighed, relaxing into the bench. 

“I think Jongho should be the one tell you all,” Hongjoong volunteered. 

Jongho pointedly looked out the window at the tumbling waves, pretending he didn’t hear Hongjoong’s remark. 

“Okay, seriously, what the ever loving fuck is going on?” a voice drifted out from Yunho’s hold. 

The boy reached down to pet Yeosang’s head soothingly and Jongho swore he heard the other hiss at him. 

“Do you want to tell them?” Hongjoong nudged Jongho. 

“I will!” Wooyoung offered. 

“No. No one wants that,” San responded. 

Wooyoung grumbled and crossed his arms with a huff. 

“Well,” Hongjoong motioned the youngest. “Go ahead.” 

Jongho cleared his throat and took a deep breath. “So you know YangYang?” he started. 

“Yes,” Mingi responded as everyone save Yunho said “No.”

“He’s the kid that’s friends with Xiaojun and Hendery,” Mingi told them. 

“The super tall one with the really nice hair that hangs out with them all the time?” Wooyoung asked. 

“No. Not that one.” 

“That’s Lucas,” Yunho clarified. 

Wooyoung didn’t listen as he was currently too busy mocking Mingi. “Oh, of course not that one. Why would it be that one?”

“Well, I’m talking about the other one,” Mingi corrected. 

“YangYang’s the kid with the giant scar from that race car crash right?” San asked, raking his brain for the memory. 

“Yeah!” Yunho pointed at him. “That kid!” 

“I have no idea who they’re talking about,” Hongjoong whispered to Seonghwa. 

“Me neither,” the boy whispered back. 

“Okay here’s the thing. I only know about this because Xion told me in Bribery and Coercion. And he only told me because YangYang was rude to him when we were all partnered in Misdirection last week. But Xion only heard it from Sana like a week ago because he helps her study for Psychopathy.” 

“Is this what it’s like to be popular because it’s exhausting,” Yeosang murmured. “I barely remember all of your names.” 

“You’ll never forget mine!” Wooyoung smiled. 

“Yeah, it’s easy. глупый.” 

Wooyoung deflated in his seat, moping. 

“You walked right into that one, bud,” Hongjoong said, rubbing the younger’s back. 

“Well,” Jongho continued. “YangYang convinced Sana and Shuhua,” the boy stopped and held up a hand, “and no do not ask me who the hell Sana and Shuhua are. He convinced them in bio-weapons to break into the teacher’s desk and take the key to the chemical lab.” 

“So?” San shrugged. “Nothing I haven’t done.” 

“Can you just stop talking for one minute!” Jongho yelled, exasperated and then realized just who he had yelled at. “Sorry.” 

“It’s fine,” San smiled. 

“Really?”

“No,” his grin dropped. “Sleep with one eye open.” 

“Anyhow… they stole a bunch of old bubonic samples, you know the ones they use for reference, and decided it would funny if they mailed sealed contents of it to the UN headquarters.” 

“Well shit,” Yunho breathed. 

“How are we supposed to shadow puppet the government if there is no government to shadow puppet?” Mingi asked. 

“Exactly!” Yunho threw back. 

“Seriously, that’s why you guys are worried?” Jongho huffed. 

“Well yeah,” Hongjoong answered. “How do you think we make all our money? It’s literally our job to coerce, bride, black mail, and violently overtake world structures.” 

“What would we do in complete and total anarchy?” Seonghwa added, rhetorically. “We’d be fucking useless.” 

“What kind of half brain dumbasses hatched up that plan?” Yeosang growled, shifting in Yunho’s lap. “Honestly.” 

“If you met YangYang it would make sense,” Jongho explained. 

“And Xiaojun and Hendery are just letting him do this?” San turned to Mingi. 

The boy held his hands up defensibly. “Hey, I don’t know what they do in their free time.” 

“You’re literally always with them!” Yeosang accused, sitting up and pushing Yunho’s steadying hands away. “I saw the three of you hanging off the wall around Michaelson like two days ago!” 

“Hendery is stupid too,” Wooyoung sighed before Mingi could defend himself. “I doubt he’d be much help anyways.” 

“I never thought the day would come, where I would agree with a single goddamn thing that came out of your dumb fucking mouth,” Seonghwa said. 

Wooyoung blinked silently with a weird look on his face. “Thank you?” 

“You’re welcome,” Seonghwa nodded back which only further confused the younger boy. 

“В семье́ не без уро́да,” Mingi muttered. 

“Wouldn’t that be you?” San teased him and earned a swat on his arm from the boy. 

Hongjoong stood up abruptly, shutting them all off. “Well, time’s up, kids. Time for bed.” 

“I’m not even tired,” Wooyoung whined. 

“Too bad. I am,” he responded, shoving open the small latch on the door which lend below deck to the beds. 

“Mingi,” Hongjoong yawned and pointed at the boy, “give Yunho a break from piloting.” 

“But-”

The look Mingi received had him halting mid-complaint and walking over to relieve his friend from the wheel. Seonghwa corralled Wooyoung down the staircase after Seonghwa. The younger boy grumbling all the while. 

“A spoon is most valuable at dinner,” Mingi said causing Yunho to turn around and notice the other’s wink as he inclined his head toward Yeosang in a not so subtle motion. 

“I know. I know. I’ll talk to him,” Yunho acquiesced. “He’s been avoiding me for over a week though.” 

“He is a very stubborn. Only grave will cure the hunchback.” 

“Yeah, thanks bud. Just go drive the boat.” 

Yunho rushed down the staircase after Yeosang and San, catching the door to the sleeping quarters over their heads and holding it closed with the palm of his hand. San looked up at his extended arm above their head and then back at Yunho in confusion before making a small ‘oh’ of realization. Yeosang refused to glance back at him, staring straight ahead at the slab of sealed wood. 

“Can I talk to you?” Yunho asked. 

“No,” Yeosang answered tersely. 

San looked back and forth between the two of them before mouthing an ‘I’ll just go,’ at Yunho silently. He eased his arm away from the door and let San through, grabbing Yeosang’s bicep as he too tried to pass through to the other room. 

“Well, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t really asking,” he said sternly grabbing onto his arm as he moved to turn away. 

“And to tell you the truth, I don’t want to,” Yeosang replied, wrenching it away. 

“It doesn’t matter if you want to or not. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do.”

“You think I don’t know that?” 

“Well you sure aren’t acting like it,” he huffed. “Running away every time something gets hard.” 

“I don’t run away.”

Yunho sighed in a short exhale of irritation. “You’re avoiding me, same thing really.” 

Yeosang crossed his arms over his chest and rolled his eyes. “It’s really not. And how could I be avoiding you if I’m here right now? It’s not like I’m hiding from you.” 

“Well, you might as well be.” 

“I don’t even know what we’re fighting about!” he exploded, whipping a sharp gaze to meet Yunho’s. “Not really!” 

Yunho felt the cut stinging as the other locked eyes with him. “Bullshit you don’t know what I’m talking about. You started it!” 

“Me?!” Yeosang gasped. “Are you fucking serious?!” 

“Yes, Yeosang, goddamit,” he groaned. 

“What did I do?!” 

“You refuse to talk to me!” he punched his hands into the hair on either side of his head, angrily needing to grip at something, anything at all. 

“I tell you everything!” 

“You didn’t tell me about him!” 

And that was it. That was the one thing which had single-handedly caused him more sleepless nights than even the tanker incident of first or his father’s vicious threats. It had plagued his mind like a parasite, sucking the life out of him with an aggressive indifference to all the pain it caused. They stood breathed harshly in the pregnant pause between them, the air thick with a viscous animosity that swept around them in currents of tense uncertainty, as if a frantic frenzy waiting for either to pounce. 

“So it is about Jimin,” Yeosang said eventually. 

“It’s because you never told me,” Yunho murmured back, but there was no anger in it, just a fragile sadness. 

The other bristled at him and scoffed before answering, “Why should I have to?”

It confused him, how much Yeosang refused to let him care, how much he refused to let him in this once. And it drove Yunho nearly to the point of madness where he clung by his nails to the cliffside, refusing to let go because he knew, he knew that if he dropped into the pit of impulse, there would be no turning back. 

“Because I care goddamit.” 

“You’re fucking jealous, Yunho!” he screamed. “This is all because you’re a big fucking baby who can’t fucking handle any adult emotion!” 

“I’m not jealous!” Yunho seethed, an angry whip wedging its way out of his chest. “I feel betrayed that you would have kept something like this from me! I’m your best friend!”

“Then respect that I don’t want to talk about it. Respect that it hurts to talks about it, that I don’t WANT to talk about him” 

“But I’m here for all your hurt! I always have been!”

“I didn’t ask you to be!” 

“Well that’s too damn bad, Yeosang. Cause I’m not going anywhere!” 

“Leave me alone,” he cried frustratedly, trying to escape him again, a tear escaping and falling down his cheek. 

He pulled Yeosang into his arms and held him tight, like he had done so many times before. But now it felt like it was the last time, like the other was running away, and this embrace was his last goodbye to him before he left. 

“Just tell me,” Yunho breathed out slow and desperate. “Tell me why it hurts so much,” he pleader into the top of Yeosang’s hair. 

“I can’t…” he mumbled. 

“Why?” 

“Because I’m still not over it.” 

His arms dropped, letting go of Yeosang’s figure. Yunho stepped back and looked him in the eye for the first time in what felt like weeks: beautiful eyes, with a birthmark falling down the corner of the left. He remembered when he first met Yeosang and the hesitance the smaller boy greeted him with, well anyone new really. He was not demure by any means, had never been. It was just a carefully guided wall, Yeosang built up around himself that Yunho had been chipping at every day since then. Sometimes the bricks tumbled out and he’d smile and tell Yunho a funny story. Sometimes, a whole section would crumble and, amidst cold feet tangled under blankets in the dorm lobbies, Yeosang would tell him about a dream or a nightmare or a silly, fettered wish. 

The scar: that had been the story nestled safely behind the bulwark, tied shut with ropes and locked with a key. It had been tucked into Yeosang’s arms like a bomb he was terrified of dropping. 

_“An old friend gave it to me,” he had told Yunho one night, nursing a mug of warm milk with honey and cinnamon, as he lay in bed sick._

_“Are they still a friend?” he had asked in return._

_“I don’t know if they ever really were.”  
_

And now. Yeosang stood in front of him, tears spilling from his tears, the same gentle ones which met him in the morning with a smile and left him at night with a soft ‘goodnight’. Yunho finally let him go. 

“Fine, then,” he said, walking away, backing up the stairs slowly. “I’ll stop,” and he was gone.


	23. Never Let Anyone Tell You What to Do

“Except for me,” Seonghwa added to end of his thought. 

Jongho blinked blankly back at him, wrapping his head around what the boy had just told him, a confusingly complex story which he was almost certain was not meant to be told let alone heard outside the small circle which experienced it. The sea wind ruffled his hair as they sat on the deck of the small ship, rocketing through the waves towards the nearest sight of land. Jongho thought Yunho had said something about Diomede Islands which Mingi then corrected as the Gvozdev Islands and honestly, when they started arguing, it was best to tune them out. 

“I had no idea that happened…” Jongho softly responded to the elder. 

“You see any fourth year medics except for Keonhee, Juyeon, and I? There’s like 10 of us. Jun’s being recruited right now but he’s the only one I’ve heard about so far.” 

“Oh, so it’s on the DL?”

“What? Why would they recruit people through the DHL?” he questioned, stuffing his hands inside his jacket and riffling around a few second before emerging victorious with a silver clasped case of cigarettes. 

“The whole department was wiped out,” he added nonchalantly, lighting the cigarette which now rested between his lips, threatening to tumble out from his mouth in a precarious lilt. 

“Well, no, but- how the hell did any of you make it out? I thought Engineering had the highest mortality rate?” 

“Freshman year was interesting.” 

“Why are you telling me?”

Seonghwa leaned forward, resting his elbows on the tops of his knees. “Because there will come a day, when someone fucks you over entirely, and I want you to be able to stand right back up and screw them so thoroughly in return that no one even dreams of fucking with you again.” 

“Woah, bud,” Hongjoong came walking over slowly to place his hands on Seonghwa’s shoulders like he was approaching a rapid, wild animal. “Stop corrupting the children, please.” 

“You think I corrupted them?”

“Well, Yeosang and Yunho yes,” Hongjoong answered truthfully 

Seonghwa gave the most emotionless, weary expression to Hongjoong in response, looking as if the weight of the world had settles on his shoulders and was constantly whispering of the judgement day into his ears. 

“Just Yunho then,” Hongjoong amended.

The look of Seonghwa’s face did not change. 

“Okay, to be fair,” Jongho inserted. “I think Wooyoung corrupted you.” 

He received a soft pleased smile in return from the elder. 

“Also, what’s up?” Seonghwa asked Hongjoong. “Do you need anything?” 

“Oh, San just told me to bring you all inside.” 

Once they were seated, among all their friends in the warm cramped cabin by the captain chair where Yunho sat quietly piloting, San turned to them all with a bright grin lighting up his face and for the first time, Jongho was a little less scared of the second year clandestine major. 

”I named the ship mayday.” 

Mingi smiled proudly at the boy. “You are, once again, my favourite person.” 

Yeosang pouted. 

“Why are _you_ upset?” Mingi asked him. 

“I’m everyone’s favourite person,” he grumbled. 

“You’re my favourite!” Wooyoung called out sweetly to Yeosang. 

“Only valid friend,” Yeosang announced pointing at the younger boy with the upmost serious demeanour. 

“I gave our ship Mayday as a handle,” San explained. 

“Which is a baller name for a boat, am I right?” Yunho interrupted, high fiving Hongjoong, across the space. 

“And now everyone who announces our ship’s presence over the marine radio, is essentially alerting the coast guard, and anyone listening in,” San added looking knowingly at Mingi, “that there is an emergency at their own location, and we can slip right through all the chaos.” 

Suddenly, Wooyoung’s voice rang loud throughout the cabin. “You gotta keep track of your units man.”

“Don’t you dare chastise me,” Seonghwa grit out from next to him. 

“It’s really unprofessional of you.” 

“You know what else is unprofessional?” the elder continued. “Me gutting you like a pig with the rusty fishing spear in that chest over there.” 

“What’s going on with you two?” Yeosang butted in. 

“All I’m saying is: if you took all my non-disclosures and threw them in a big pile. It would weigh way less than a ton,” Wooyoung defended. 

“When I said you made a fuck ton of dumb decisions that it is not what I meant, and you know it.” 

“You did not clarify. Therefore, you are wrong.” 

“You annoy me,” Seonghwa retorted. “Therefore, I will kill you.” 

“Wait but why did we have to sneak in?” Jongho asked, having learned to ignore whatever the two chose to inevitably fight about on an hourly basis. 

“Yeah, you know I have a diplomatic passport,” Mingi remined them all. 

“So do I,” Seonghwa said. 

Hongjoong turned to him, surprised. “You do?”

“I get flagged at airports!” Wooyoung supplied happily. 

“Gee, I wonder why,” San mocked. 

“Wait!” Yunho shouted. “We can figure out his name now!” 

“Whose name?” Jongho asked. 

“Seonghwa’s!” San yelled. 

“That’s not his name?” Wooyoung tilted his head, uncertain. 

“No??” Yeosang answered the boy. “You’ve known him for two years. How do you not know that??”

“We’re sneaking in,” San answered Jongho, paying no mind to the exchange between the others, “because the school doesn’t take kindly to escapees- I mean truancy. And if they found out we left without anything to prove for it….” his voice drifted off. 

“What do you mean that’s not his name?” Wooyoung asked again, but no one listened to the poor confused boy. 

“What makes you think you can look me up in a diplomat registry?” Seonghwa smirked at Yunho. 

The boy fumbled for a second over his thoughts before responding, “Then, I’ll just hack into the British governmental records of citizens issued diplomatic standings.” 

“What makes you think I’m a British citizen?” 

“THE FUCKING ACCENT AND THE EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU!” Yunho exploded at the other. 

“That’s really not his name?” Wooyoung asked again, staring at the eldest boy in an ungraspable puzzlement. 

“So why are we sneaking in?” Mingi added. 

“Are you- are you really serious right now?” Hongjoong turned to him. 

The younger boy shrugged his shoulders, holding his hands up in a gesticulated defence as if to say ‘I’m causing no more harm than anyone else here’ which Hongjoong accepted was an accurate argument. 

“We have to sneak in because the U.S, government is almost as nosy as Yunho is,” Yeosang ridiculed from the corner. 

“Oh come on,” the offended boy huffed. 

“Sangie, you can tone it a little if you want,” San volunteered. 

Said boy whipped his head around to the other and glared him down. San looked to Hongjoong for help, but the boy simply motioned a finger drawing across his neck in a slicing motion with a teasing smile. 

”If someone can so kindly prevent Yeosang from murdering and/or patronizing me for the next half hour or so, I can get us into port,” Yunho sighed. 

“I’m not doing anything but keeping to myself,” he sassily replied. 

“Come on, let’s go downstairs,” Hongjoong offered, holding his hand out to pull Yeosang up. “San too.” 

“But I don’t want to,” San whined. 

“Nope, you’re coming. I am commandeering your person and you have exactly zero say in the matter.” 

“I wish I had a cooler dad,” he growled. 

“Hey! I’m cool!” Seonghwa threw in. 

“The only dad I want is Yeosang.” 

“That’s not an option, San!” Hongjoong yelled back. “Also, as much as I too would like for Yeosang to ran a brick through Yunho’s skull, I also do not want to drown.” 

“I’ll come,” Jongho offered.

“You’re taking his side?” Yunho asked him. “Seriously?”

“There are sides?” 

“Can everyone just shut the hell up for once and we can, I don’t know, maybe not end up in a horrible fiery pit of despair for the very first time in our lives?” 

Seven heads pivoted to Hongjoong, Yeosang and San flanking his sides, one resting his head on the elder’s shoulder and the other with his wrist firmly locked in the elder boy’s grip. Seonghwa and Wooyoung were miraculously quieted and Yunho’s eyes were very much not on their current direction of travel. 

“Sorry dad,” Jongho replied reservedly.

“Not my dad,” Mingi murmured softly unable to help himself and earning a whack on the back of his head from Seonghwa. 

\---  
10 Facts about Seonghwa:  
1\. He has a British accent (trained or natural uncertain). However it has been revealed he is not (at least legally) a British citizen.  
2\. He has dirty blonde hair, most discernibly undyed.  
3\. His first name may or may not be Seonghwa (unconfirmed from the boy himself). Seeing as it was the only name Hongjoong could find appearing in the boy’s school records (which were burned per school tradition a week after his admission), that is what they chose to call him.  
4\. He, presumably, has a last name.  
5\. He likes the Shinee. A lot.  
6\. Wooyoung annoys him so impossibly much that it feels safe to assume he has no younger siblings, and quite possibly none at all.  
7\. He is 5’10”.  
8\. He enjoys wearing long, thick coats: black, navy, and dark grey.  
9\. He is literate in English, Basque, Korean, and Latin. (The Basque is rusty.)  
10\. He absolutely despises the taste of anything bitter.


	24. Bonding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is a little long but oh well

“Alright, Yunho,” Hongjoong said looked at the boy. “You and Yeosang- No, do not argue with me on this- You and Yeosang track the package. If it isn’t inside the building yet, call us. If it is, which I’m assuming is true, we’ll need you both to get inside and intercept it. I need a fully rendered plan for breach and recovery by the time we meet up. ” 

“San, you get Wooyoung,” Hongjoong added. 

“Yay!” Wooyoung cheered in response before San viciously kicked him in the shin to shut him up. 

“I need you to track down this list of deactivating agent in case the bloody thing actually goes off.” 

San nodded in response. 

“Mingi you… uh…” Hongjoong stumbled for a moment trying to find an excuse before sighing deep in his chest. He looked at the smiling boy with such utter dejection, “Please just don’t fuck anything up.” 

Mingi saluted in response. 

“I’ll take Jongho and Seonghwa and work out badges and schematics,” he continued. 

“Why do you get the easy one?” Yunho argued. 

“Technically, Mingi gets the easy one,” San said. 

“No,” Seonghwa shook his head. “It’s hard for Mingi.” 

Hongjoong passed out backpacks and phones to them all, Wooyoung screeching and jumping away as Hongjoong tossed him his. San scoffed and picked it up, grabbing the boy’s arm and waving a short goodbye as he embarked the ship with the protesting boy in tow. Yunho and Yeosang departed next, one with a weary expression and the other with a stone cold professional mask.

“Neither fur, nor feather,” Mingi threw out at Yunho as the two separated. 

“To the devil,” Yunho smiled back. 

“Mingi,” Seonghwa said as Hongjoong and Jongho stood on the dock waiting for him. “Could you please, pretty please, refrain from every impulse you get for the next 24 hours?” 

“No promises, chief,” he grinned in response and closed the cabin door. 

\--- 

_Wooyoung and San_

“I never thought I’d see the end of my days come so quickly. Finding myself faced with the inevitability of my own mortality, I falter at the uncertainty of what lays beyond. But I know that I have lived a good and plentiful life.”

“Oh my god shut up,” San groaned. “We’re not even there yet!” 

Wooyoung flopped onto the snow laden ground, back solidly colliding with the packed surface. “I can’t go on. Leave me here to die.” 

“Get. The hell. Up.” San grunted, kicking him in the leg with each breathe. 

“No,” he responded resolutely, not moving a muscle. “I’m dead.” Wooyoung turned his face towards San. “I died.” 

“We’ve been walking for twenty minutes, Wooyoung, you lazy sod!” 

“I’ve spent my whole life on the road. It’s my home: hardly ever known anything but the passing treeline.” 

"Why do you sound like a 30 year old chain smoker?” San asked unimpressed. 

“I could write a memoir,” he mused, ignoring the other. “About my life… about my struggles as a refugee.” 

“You’ve been walking for TWENTY MINUTES!” 

“It’s been a lifetime,” he ruminated staring at the tops of the trees surrounding them, his body nestled in the snowbank on the side of the road. 

“I could just leave you here.” 

“You won’t even send me off properly?” he frowned. “Not even a vigil or a tombstone to mark my body?” 

“If I was allowed to kill you, you would have never gone through puberty.” 

“I’m a young buck! In the prime of my life! Chopped down! Forgotten! Unlo- … Wait, San! Where are you going? San?!” he yelled quickly extracting his body from the snow and running after the other boy. 

\----

 _Hongjoong, Seonghwa, and Jongho_

“I think one of Ms. Delora’s eyes isn’t real,” Jongho suddenly murmured. 

They were seated at a table in a small coffee shop in New York City, nursing exceptionally strong coffees as they had just gotten off a privately chartered, and definitely illegal with the doctored manifest and the whole bit, plane from Anchorage to Teterboro. Jongho was bleary eyed, staring intently down into the depths of his americano as if it held the answers to the universe, or at least his current train of thought. 

“Ms. Delora?” Hongjoong asked the younger. 

Jongho slowly looked up from his drink and blinked blankly at the elder. “Yeah. It doesn’t blink normally.” 

“And you noticed this how?” Seonghwa asked. 

“I watch her,” Jongho said softly. “I watch her eyes. They don’t blink in time and she has everyone else fooled but not me. I know” 

“You okay there, buddy?” Hongjoong asked concerned. 

“Yeah, Doctor Remington is the one with the robot eye,” Seonghwa added. 

Hongjoong scoffed. “That’s a rumour.” 

“No, it’s not. He showed me. Popped the whole thing out and everything.” 

“Why would he show you his eye?” Hongjoong asked sceptically. 

“Juyeon does prosthetics,” he shrugged. “He made it for him.” 

“So Delora could have a fake eye!” Jongho’s voice came out loud and abrasive. 

“No, sorry. Juyeon would have told me.” 

“But Delora did off a kid who failed her final our first year,” Hongjoong inserted. 

“Does that happen often?” Jongho asked, equally intrigued and scared. 

“Just the one time,” Seonghwa waved him off. “It’s usually Tiffany racking up the body count, but it’s not counted in department statistics because they’re all undeclared.” 

“She really knows how to weed out the first years,” Hongjoong laughed. 

They all quieted for a moment, sipping their coffee in peace as the bustle of the city passed by faintly through the glass. The shop was relatively empty as the early morning hours eased their way into the concrete and brick lined streets. 

“Is Doyeon dating Keonhee?” Hongjoong asked Seonghwa, setting his cup down. 

“I don’t know. Keonhee doesn’t really talk to me. Mostly, that kid that’s in love with Mingi. What’s his name?” 

“Hwanwoong? The short kid in Clan?” 

“Yeah him.”

“So wait, are they dating?” Hongjoong asked again. 

“Is Doyeon the one who’s dating Lucas or the one who models and always has Sarin in her makeup bag?” Jongho questioned. 

“How do you know Doyeon carries around Sarin?” Seonghwa asked, slightly taken aback. 

It was not usual to see him surprised, having built up a system of loyal confidents at the Factory who reported information back to him. The boy was, quite literally, in every corner of the school. 

“I needed Chapstick while I was waiting for Yunho one day,” Jongho simply answered. 

\--- 

_Wooyoung and San_

“HOW THE FUCK DID YOU END UP IN THIS SITUATION?!” San screamed from a good six stories below Wooyoung, his voice shrill as it drifted up through the air to the other’s ears. 

“I DON’T KNOW. I ALSO DON’T WANT ME TO BE DOING THIS!” Wooyoung bellowed back. 

“THEN STOP!”

“I CAN’T!” 

“WOOYOUNG. YOU WILL DIE.” 

“It’s not like I don’t have any self-preservation it’s just that I don’t have any self-preservation!” he called back, slightly less panicked. 

“AND IF YOU DON’T DIE NOW, I AM GOING TO KILL YOU AFTERWARDS!” 

“Well, now I don’t even want to come down!” he yelled over the howling wind. 

“YOU OBLONG DOUCHE!” She screamed back, spiting the anger out of her mouth. “GET THE FUCK DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW!” 

“I am starting to think you do not know the definition of enticement!” 

“YOU FIRST RATE FUCKER, DEMENTED DICK WIPE, COAFULATED CLUSTERFUCK OF A MAN!” 

“HOW IN THE EVER LOVING FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO RESPOND TO THAT?!” 

\----

 _Hongjoong, Seonghwa, and Jongho_

“So uh- then you just click here, and it should show you the badge numbers of all the employees,” Hongjoong calmly laid out to Jongho as the two perched in front of his laptop. 

“Oh, that’s so cool!” Jongho praised. “Do you think I should be a cyber major?” he asked Seonghwa who sat behind the screen sipping a strong black tea. 

“Oh, so you’re deciding to stay,” the elder asked raising an eyebrow. 

“Well, if I don’t have to kill anybody else…” Jongho started explaining, oblivious to the exchange between Hongjoong and Seonghwa where the former indicated with a silent miming that he would tell the latter about it later. “And I can make sure that I’m just doing like, non-violent government puppetry and financial whatnot, then sure!” 

“I’m so happy for you,” Hongjoong smiled. 

“I was thinking of cyber or government actually. I’m in misdirection, hacking, and bribery right now, so I feel like I set myself up pretty well for either of those,” the first year paused to think. “But econ and gov sound kind of fun too.” 

“If I can offer some advice, I think second year economics is a bloodbath. I have some people you can talk to. My friend Vernon made it through just barely, but Mingi knows some kids: Yuqi, Lucas… am I forgetting anyone?” he asked Hongjoong. 

“Oh Harin! Remember Him?” 

“Oh yeah, Harin. I haven’t talk to him since second year. Or Chanhee, how is he?” Seonghwa inquired about Hongjoong’s classmate. 

“Oh, he’s doing alright. Quite frankly, I think the only reason Changmin hasn’t blown up the school for attention is because he knows Chanhee wouldn’t let him.”

“God, he’s worse than Wooyoung isn’t he?” 

“I thought no one was worse than Wooyoung?” Jongho pipped up. 

“Thank god you don’t want to be an engineer,” Seonghwa leaned over to pet Jongho’s mop of hair. “I don’t know if I could take it.” 

“If he wants to do government he could talk to Rocky?” Hongjoong volunteered. 

“Isn’t Rocky afraid of San?” Jongho asked. 

“Everyone is afraid of San,” both Seonghwa and Hongjoong responded. 

“Why can’t I just talk to Yunho and Mingi?” 

“They are, quite possibly, the dumbest people I have ever met in my entire life,” Seonghwa answered. 

“What about Eric or Sunwoo?” Hongjoong thought aloud. “They took pretty much the same classes last year right?” 

“Yeah. Talk to them. They’re both in gov now but I think they were debating declaring it. Juyeon had to help them make a pro and con list.” 

“Do you know why they both picked government?” Jongho asked. 

“Over economics? Less violence I think,” Hongjoong responded. 

“Those econ kids…” Seonghwa breathed. “Sometimes I wonder if the Quartermaster should have been based out of their department instead. You should just take Fragility of the Human Body. Easiest A I ever made.” 

“But I don’t… I don’t want to take medicine,” Jongho replied. 

“Fine. Whatever. It’s not like I’m offended or anything. Just take cyber like Hongjoong. See if I care.” 

Hongjoong leaned into Jongho where they both sat smushed behind the laptop. “He cares.” 

\--- 

_Wooyoung and San_

“So that was fun,” Wooyoung smiled. 

“You were this close to dying,” San muttered, holding his hand out, fingers an inch apart.

“That’s not that small,” Wooyoung mused. “Usually when people say that they make it a lot smaller.” 

“No, I’m showing you where the edge of the building was and where your hand managed to grab on to it.” 

“Oh,” he paused. “Then it’s pretty small.” 

“No shit, sherlock!” 

Wooyoung pouted. “You know I don’t like it when you reference things I haven’t watched.” 

“It’s a book, idiot.” 

“Hey, just because I didn’t go to a fancy middle school-”

“You went to Le Rosey!” San indicted, throwing his hands in the air. 

“For like a week,” Wooyoung defended. “They expelled me for blowing up the entire winter campus.” 

“Just don’t die, dipshit,” San grumbled. 

“Awwn you care about me,” Wooyoung beamed. 

“No, I don’t.” 

“You like me. You don’t want me to die,” Wooyoung teased, pocking his finger in the other’s unamused face.

San said nothing in response, jaw tensing in frustration. 

“You don’t want me to get hurt because you’re a soft baby with emotions and feelings and-”

San threw his arms up again and groaned so viscerally Wooyoung felt it vibrate in his core. “IT’S BECAUSE I FUCKING LIKE YOU, YOU IDIOT!” 

Wooyoung faltered, stopping right where he was. “You… like me?”

“WELL, RIGHT NOW I HATE YOU BUT YEAH USUALLY!” 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked stepping closer to San with an uncharacteristically serious face and disposition. 

“I will fucking eviscerate you right now. I am very goddamn angry, and I need you to get the hell out of my face for at least 5 minutes.” 

“You like me!” Wooyoung said tauntingly, a grin spread across his face. 

“10 MINUTES!” San screamed, pulling a knife out. 

“Okay,” he yelped, moving to excuse himself. “That’s a really pretty knife by the way!” he called out, body half way out the door already. 

\----

 _Hongjoong, Seonghwa, and Jongho_

“Oil man. They’re all about oil. You get some petroleum guys under your belt and the middle east just opens up.”

“Yeah. I don’t particularly have anything against the environment so I’m going to have to pass,” Jongho responded. 

“Okay, gov. You get a few warlords to start fighting on the commission of a major weapons dealer-”

“Nope, no warlords,” Jongho answered. 

“What about Cyber?” Hongjoong volunteered. “ I don’t directly kill anyone. Just little foreign policy nudges on security complexes and some blackmail threats. I could pull a successful Stuxnet but am I going to? No. Way too much clean up.” 

“Just do what makes you happy,” Seonghwa said, clapping Jongho on the shoulder. 

“That’s shit advice you know it,” Jongho grumbled. 

“What?” Seonghwa derided. “You want me to tell you you’ve already killed two people in your first semester? That you’re practically acing coercion whether you like it nor because you somehow got 7 goddamn Genius kids on a boat mid-week to save your ass? That with the shit you put up with on a daily basis you probably have the management skills to take over a small cohort of African militia governments? Cause you can!” 

“That’s not what I-”

“Bullshit!” Seonghwa yelled, cutting him off. “Bull! Shit! You’re so fucking smart Jongho and I want you to know that I had I not seen something in you that day we met, I would have let Wooyoung blow you to bits.” 

“You don’t mean…?”

“Yes. I sabotaged the first year welcome bomb. Do not tell Wooyoung.”


	25. Everyone's Favourite Dysfunctional Duo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, I was in Florida and then California and i'm supposed to be going to Tokyo in two weeks for school.

“Should we attempt to find the itinerary for the package or check records for viable parcels within a realistic parameter?” Yunho asked the other boy. 

Yeosang clicked his tongue in response and looked away from Yunho with a visible flex in his jaw. 

“Yeosang?” Yunho leaned toward him. 

“Sorry, what was that? Are you asking my opinion?” 

“Yes?” 

“So, it matters what I think now?”

“What are you-”

“When I told you to drop the Jimin, you didn’t?” Yeosang shrugged indignantly. “So I just figured you didn’t really care what I had to say.” 

“Are you serious, right now?” Yunho balked. “I said I would drop it,” he answered sternly. 

“No, no,” Yeosang waved him off. “It just surprised me you would ask me considering you ignore me anyways.” 

“I have never,” Yunho paused, “once in my life, ignored you.” 

The look Yunho received in the next second clearly indicated Yeosang did not express similar sentiments on the matter and was very, if not aggressively, annoyed Yunho would insinuate as much. 

The subway entrance came into view and Yeosang checked the sign with a quick tilt of his head before barrelling down the stairs, feet pounding quickly on the steps as he rocketed himself away from the boy behind him. People filtered on either side of them in streams of long coats which dusted against their ankles, and scarves wrapped tightly around their throats. Yunho followed at a more leisurely pace, hands stuffed inside his pockets and chin pulled down to his chest. 

“Is this about Townsend?” he asked, coming to stand beside the other boy at the tracks. 

“Why not through him in too? You hate all the men in my life, now.” 

“Are you really bring up fucking Townshend right now?” Yunho asked him, vexed, spreading his arms wide in the subway tunnel in which they currently stood waiting. “That was a fucking assignment, you dolt!” 

“And you lied to me again.”

“Lied to you? Name one time I lied to you?!” 

Yeosang opened his mouth. 

“Besides goddamn Townshend!” Yunho cut him off. 

Yeosang jolted his head haughtily with the fakest smile Yunho had ever seen grace another human’s face. The train rolled in the next second, sending Yeosang and Yunho’s hair whipping around them in a frenzy. They stood resolute in the wind and the screeching metal as it rolled to a stop before them. 

“No, you know what never mind,” Yeosang said, walking onto the subway. 

A man standing beside Yunho leaned in as she passed through the door. “They never mean that,” he whispered knowingly. 

“Yeah, thanks, buddy,” Yunho sneered, following Yeosang onto the train car. 

Yeosang stood by the unopened door along the opposite wall, leaning against them, propped into the corner by the start of the chairs, with his arms crossed. Yunho walked in front of him and motioned to the empty chair Yeosang was perched adjacent to. 

“Care to sit down?” 

The other glared at Yunho as an answer before turning his gaze back to the subway car, barely flinching at his presence. 

“I just thought you might want to sit down.” 

“Oh, and now you know what I want,” Yeosang grumbled. “Is this a fucking dystopian novel where I’m not allowed my own thoughts and desires for the ‘good of the people’?” 

“Jesus! I was just offering you a seat, you asshole.” 

“You’re so nice and perfect,” Yeosang drawled. “And wonderful and perfect and – and just fucking perfect.” 

“Oh, don’t I just love when you get like this,” Yunho lamented. “Cant keep it sane like, like…” he looked out over the passengers, noticing a young man and woman who had just entered their car. “Like them!” he eventually said, pointing at them across Yeosang’s line of view, arm extending before his face. 

“You know,” Yeosang ignored him. “I bet the goddamn C.I.A. knows about everything. Isn’t it funny? The Patriot Act. Maybe we should just extend it? Yeah,” he threw his arms wide, “to fucking everyone.” 

“And he’s offering a seat to her now. Oh, look; she thanked him. How sweet. I bet they’re good friends,” Yunho mockingly chirped. “I bet they share all their secrets,” he added with a tight smile. 

“And the SVR RF, don’t even get me started on the SVR. They know everything. Might as well just share another Wikileaks tap, you know.” 

“Now, he’s taking her bag for her. She just seems so appreciative. Oh! A whisper!” 

“Why do we even have locks on our doors? Or passcodes on our phones?” 

“They seem like they sure do have a lot of trust. Yeah, TRUST. What a truly beautiful thing to share between two people.” 

“Come to think of it, let’s invent telepathy. So no one even has any fucking private thoughts anymore, either!” 

“I wish I had someone that trusted me to tell me their secrets too: the good foundation of any friendship. Thought I did…” 

“Do you know my blood type? My titer level?! My mental health records?! The nightmare I had when I was 7 about the goddamn tree in our backyard?!” 

“I bet they’re happy. They sure look it. Maybe its because they never kept anything important from each other intentionally? Maybe it’s because they care about the other person’s feeling?” 

“Or my journal! My fucking diary! Wanna see that? Should I post it online?!” 

“Oh those smiles! What a wonderful, perfect, little…”

They both stopped their haggard ranting, pausing with wide eyes and slack eyes as the two people they had been observing, and Yunho detailing in a rather maliciously frantic manner, started to kiss, rather passionately, in the middle of the train car. Averting their gazes, Yunho coughing an awkwardly forced cough and Yeosang clearing a throat which was very much not in need of clearing, they quieted down, and the argument simply dropped. 

“So the uh- the package,” Yeosang stuttered out after a moment. 

“What?”

“The package,” he said loader, enunciating the words. 

“Right, the uh…” Yunho mumbled. “The package.” 

“I think it might be better if we looked for possible matches instead of, you know, trying to trace an untraceable origin,” he explained. 

“I honestly didn’t think you were listening to me.” 

“For Jongho.” 

Yunho inclined his head in a silent question, blinking blankly at the boy. 

“I listened for Jongho,” Yeosang huffed, turning his head to watch out the subway window at the abyss of shadowed tunnel thundering by their tiny, quiet passenger car. 

The package was, on all accounts, rather impossible to find considering it came from an undisclosed location from one of the most clandestinely shrouded regions of the world, and to a destination which was, on the whole, rather known for bureaucratic protocol relating to information sharing and certain degree of secrecy itself. Of course, the parameters of the UN headquarters were not and would never be on the same level to that of the Factory, but it was a valiant effort on their part to attempt equalization in matters pertaining to security and privacy. 

Any amount of money can bribe a man. Yeosang had seen as a little as a dollar back in Ankara when he was in her first year. Granted, the dollar was laced with a string chemical formula largely believed to cure what the man writhing on the floor in front of him was dying from, but nevertheless he was bought for a dollar. He rather thought it counted. Yunho had made his fair share of botched deals and weighed trade agreement as the resident economics major in their group and, as the son of a multi-billionaire, knew the worth of each and every transaction he made. Economics was widely regarded as one of the most cutthroat degrees, but seeing as interdepartmental tradition and initiation sharing was frowned upon, no one could ever say for certain, without the shadow of a doubt, whether this was true or not. 

Anyways, money. It made the world go round. It especially made Yunho’s world go round. If he thought he could fix his argument with Yeosang by buying him a small island off the coast of New Zealand, he would have done so already ten times over and then some. Alas, Yeosang, he had come to know, was rather stubborn about their fights. That and Yeosang had no use for such islands; he hated hot weather. It reminded him of home. 

The man at the desk of the UN headquarters package and parcel intake had a baffling lowballed price for blackmail purposes. The man hadn’t even bothered to ask how the two had made it inside the secure building, but both the students assumed it was on account that privileged children, ambassador’s offspring or bribed interns, all carried themselves with the same frightfully engrained arrogance. 

“You just want to see into the room?” the man asked, uncertain. 

"That’s right,” Yeosang smiled sweetly. 

“Not take anything?” he clarified. “Just look?” 

“Yes, sir,” Yunho drawled, growing impatient at the man’s hesitancy. 

“Well, I’ll be darned,” the guard breathed. “I suppose that’s alright.”  
Yunho chuckled as he grabbed probably a quarter of the bills in his duffle bag to hand over to the glassy eyes guard and he motioned them back into the storage room. 

“Oh, it looks heavy,” Yunho groaned kicking the box with her foot lightly. 

“You can’t fucking move it, you idiot,” Yeosang hissed, yanking the boy back with a swift and aggressive tug of his bicep. “It’s a goddamn pressure bomb. You never listen!” 

He shrugged and rolled his eyes. “I am NOT putting more effort than I want to into this little joyride.” 

“I thought you wanted to help Jongho?”

“We all know Seonghwa is the only one here to ‘help Jongho’,” he mocked. 

Yeosang bent down on his knees next to the box, wrapped in a dirtied light brown parchment and tied with a string, air stamps from both the US and Russia marking its surface. 

"This looks like a cartoon,” he mumbled. 

“What kind of cartoon attempts to topple the world’s only hope for unity and re-engage history’s most deadly pandemic?”

“We can’t all watch Bugs Bunny…” Yeosang huffed, standing up once again. 

Yunho walked to the doorway of the storeroom and peeked his head around the frame towards the guard at the desk who was excitedly flipping through his newly acquired capital. 

“When are these due to be delivered?” 

“Tomorrow,” the guard replied, not looking up. “Probably around 10:30 to the offices.” 

Yunho threw his body into the doorframe with a groan, limp spine and guttural contestation vibrating through his chest. “Now, I fucking have to get up early too?!”


	26. Empty Nesters

“Where is Seonghwa? We have to turn in our independent research drafts in like a week…” a voice mused in the Genius cafeteria that morning. 

Juyeon, an outspoken and friendly boy from the medical school who held an affinity for the production and concealment of prosthetic weaponry and was known quite publicly as Seonghwa’s roommate, heaved another gulp of artificially sweetened coffee down his throat before his tablemates had the chance to respond. 

“Yeah,” Yein mused in realization from beside him, legs tucked up on the seat beside her. “And Yeosang hasn’t been in the lab for like three days!” 

“He lives in there…” 

“Honestly, it's been what?” Yein inquired. “Three days? Yeosang has been gone longer than that. Heck, I’ve been gone longer than that.”

“Yeah, when Kanghyun came back from his Quartermaster assessment and you couldn’t stay off of-”  
Juyeon was cut from finishing his teasing remark as the side of a tensed hand made contact with his throat, causing him to choke ever so slightly on his own saliva and gasp to regain a grip on his breathing. 

“Nothing has exploded in the basement of the mechanics building for a while!” a voice threw out, clamouring down across from Juyeon and Yein with a clatter of silverware and chipped, previously and recently alike, china. 

Yein turned to look at the boy confused as Juyeon questioned, “What does that mean, Felix?” 

“Wooyoung,” he supplied as an answer which seemed to placate them. 

“What the hell is going on?” Yein breathed out in amazement. 

“It’s no good omen when the bad men go to war,” Felix mumbled in response. 

“That’s- that’s not how that saying works,” Juyeon corrected the younger boy, a volatile if not well mannered and well-meaning engineering student. “You know that right?” 

“No, of course, I know. But it’s rather silly, isn’t it?” 

“What is?” Yein asked. 

“I’m not scared of the good men in war. They have their morals, don’t they? I’ll only ever be scared of the bad men because, well,” he shrugged. “I know what I would do to win and it’s not pretty.” 

“Felix, you never fail to amaze me,” Juyeon smiled, ruffling the beaming boy’s hair with an affectionate flick of his wrist. 

Felix was and would always be an enigma of a boy, largely built on the nature of his disposition juxtaposed to the bright innocence he radiated with full freckled cheeks and docile eyes. There was never, in all the years Genius had seen, what could be called a ‘soft’ kid in the engineering department but somehow, at the introduction of Felix into the major at the beginning of the year, that fact had changed and changed drastically. 

It seemed the trio had, inevitably, acquired the attention of a few students milling around them. This was unsurprising seeing as Juyeon was a well-known fixture in the Factory’s underground black market, Yein was famously an unmovable force who had captured the heart of the current Quartermaster and had the boy wrapped around her finger, and Felix, previously mentioned, was the resident sunshine contradiction of the most deadly and unstable major. 

“I don’t think Jongho has been to his criminal mindset since last Tuesday.”

Felix whipped around with comedically wide eyes, brimming in nativity that seemed to ask a million questions, least of all ‘who the heck are you?’ 

“What was that?” Juyeon asked the nameless and visibly trembling child who was most undoubtedly a first year. 

“Jongho. He’s gone too,” the boy added. 

“Who even are you?” Yein asked. 

“Cya.” 

“Well, Cya. I have no idea who Jongho is, and I honestly do not care,” Yein simply responded. 

“No, no, the kid’s on to something,” Juyeon supplied. “I’ve seen Jongho wandering around with Seonghwa a few times.” 

“So that’s Seonghwa, Wooyoung, Yeosang, and considering Yeosang is gone it probably means Yunho is gone and assuming Yunho is gone Mingi is probably gone, and this kid Jongho,” Yein said listing off the kids on her fingers. 

“Something’s not right…” Felix added. 

“Oh how wonderful!” yelled Yeri bounding up and sitting between the two. “I love when things go wrong.” 

“No, not that,” said Juyeon. “I mean, we don’t know where like 6 kids are.”

“Oh you mean San,” Yeri responded. 

“Is he gone too?” Felix asked to which she hummed an affirmative. 

“Has anyone seen Hongjoong either? Has Minho said anything?” Juyeon asked. 

They all shook their heads. 

“Do you think they’re helping Seonghwa with his dissertation or something?” Yeri questioned Yein. “Also,” she continued, digging in her bag, “Yein, I found a letter for you in the dorm cubbies.” 

“I mean, I don’t exactly know what his project is but why would he need 7 people to help him?” she answered, ignoring Yeri who still had lost her entire forearm to her backpack in search. 

“Assuming they’re all together,” Juyeon inserted. 

“Assuming they’re all together,” Yein acquiesced. 

“Hmmmm. This is very on brand for Wooyoung though. I’ll try to radio him later,” Felix added. 

“Radio?” Yeri asked him. 

“He doesn’t trust phones. Ya know, government surveillance and location services. That whole thing.” 

“Fair enough,” Yeri shrugged. “If I could hack all your phones I totally would.” 

“Oh, I can. Doesn’t mean I will, but I can,” Felix rambled as they stared at him uncertainly. “I won’t! I just wanted you to know I could.” 

“You’re a weird kid,” Yein breathed out. 

“Hey, Yein, the letter, can I open it?” Yeri interrupted, now holding the blasted, near impossible to find letter, aloft in the air like a trophy. 

Yein paused, glancing at the econ student with a raised eyebrow at the small white envelope in the other’s hand. “Did you just ask me if you could open my mail for me?” 

“Yeah?” Yeri responded. 

“You’re waiting for my permission to open it?” 

“Yes?”

“You’re seriously asking me if you can open my mail?” Yein attempted to clarify, uncharacteristically flabbergasted. 

“Isn’t it illegal to open other people’s mail?” 

“Yeri!” Yein yelled. “You’ve murdered like 6 people!” 

“What about it?” the girl shrugged, oblivious. “I’m just asking if I can open this letter, man. You could say no.” 

“How are the girls doing?” Felix leaned over to Juyeon as Yein blabbered on about why, if choosing to follow any law, postage and privacy of letters was perhaps one of the most confusing to choose. 

“Heejin and Hyunjin?” Juyeon questioned, receiving an affirmatory nod from the younger boy. “Lusting over Hwall as usual,” he answered. “I’ve grown to accept the idiosyncrasies of my children and love them without abandon despite their notoriously terrible taste in boys.” 

Felix laughed. “That kid is seriously the new heartbreaker. Right as soon as Taeyang and Jacob graduated.” 

“Oh, I know Taeyang!” Cya chirped. 

“You?!” Juyeon inquired. “How do you know Taeyang?” 

“He was friends with Ravn,” Cya smiled. “You know, Ravn? Kinda tall. Black hair. Pretty face.” 

“Of course I know who Ravn is!” Felix screamed. “He’s like best friends with Chris!” 

“Chris!” Cya joined in excitedly. “I met him!” he pointed at Felix. 

“Dear lord, you two are worse than the girls,” Juyeon sighed, running his hands down his face in exasperation. “Why didn’t Seonghwa take me with him?” he groaned. 

“You love me,” Felix smiled. “And I love this kid,” he looped an arm around Cya’s neck pulling the boy into his embrace without resistance. “So therefor, you love both of us.” 

“You met him five minutes ago for hell’s sake.”

Felix rotated his head in thought, resting it at 45 degrees of thoughtfulness. “Does hell have a sake? Is there anything done in the sake of hell? 

“What does that even mean?” Juyeon asked him. “What are you asking me?”

“Well, the thing is,” Felix answered. “Sinning is not in benefit of hell because well, it’s punished. And do-gooders have nothing to do with it, so surely not them either. Like what’s the agenda? Hell doesn’t support either side of the coin. I really don’t even know what it wants.” 

“He has a point,” Cya added with a nod of his own head. 

“How do you even know Ravn?” Juyeon turned to Cya. 

“He’s Xion’s cousin. Practically raised me.”

Juyeon immediately softened at the name. “Xion? That cute kid in Bribery and Coercion with Jongho? I love him.” 

Cya looked unsurprised. “Everyone loves Xion.” 

Minho marched up behind Yein and Juyeon, placing a hand on each of his friend’s shoulders. “Has anyone seen Hongjoong?” 

“No!” four voices boomed back at the boy while Cya merely raised his arms in and equally defensive and confused gesture.


	27. The Regent of Tomorrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's a chapter because someone wrote me a really nice comment and I feel guilty for not updating in so long :(((  
> Please accept my most humble apologies  
> also stay safe and be happy <3

The Baccarat was a staple in New York: a landmark of Manhattan and a favourite respite for the weary heads of the world’s elite, including, of course, Seonghwa and his unnamed, unknown family. The boy grew up with school weekends in Milan, winter nights between different friends’ chalets in the Alpes, spontaneous jaunts to Tokyo during the fall, summers in Mykonos ,and springs spent lounging in the plush beds of the Baccarat. By far his favourite of the excursions and the holidays was always the palace on 53rd street, directly smacked in the middle of the block next to the MOMA and across from Fogo de Chao. Easter had been celebrated with his mother dripping in diamonds seated in the spa, and Seonghwa eating gourmet chocolates in the back of chauffeured 1967 Aston Martin or 1972 Citroen on à propos drives. Shrove Tuesday was enjoyed goring on anything from smoked truffles to gold dipped foie gras, taking advantage of the wealth of his brithright. 

But Seonghwa didn’t enjoy the Baccarat for its sentimentality or the memories accrued there, not for the women which winked at his perfectly sculpted jawline every time he stepped through their doors with his swept back hair. It wasn’t the clear as sin crystal or the deep dark woods of the bespoke furniture or the similarly endowed patrons with deliciously expensive perfumes which wafted through the corridors after each and every guest. Seonghwa happened to like the Baccarat for the pillows. Said boy had checked himself into his usual suite as soon as he and the others had landed in the city, vaulted himself into a stark white bed, and had not emerged from it since.

“So then Jongho said he wanted to visit a friend and I kind of just let him go,” Hongjoong said over the phone as he walked to Seonghwa’s hotel suite, over pristine dark wood floors and intricately stitched lush Persian rugs. “Said he’d pick up Mingi on his way back.” 

“What about the problem children?” Seonghwa huffed through the receiver. 

“San and Wooyoung are…”

“Hello? Did the line cut out?” Seonghwa asked into the silence. 

Hongjoong cleared his throat, glancing around the Baccarat at the people sitting beneath shimmering chandeliers and before glistening mirrors. “To tell you the truth, I have no idea what they are, but they seemed really, I don’t know, affectionate.”

“Are they not always?” 

“No. This is…”

“For Judas I swear, just say it,” Seonghwa groaned. 

“Well, they kissed,” Hongjoong finally responded. 

“They what?”

“They kissed,” Hongjoong repeated into the speaker a little louder the second time gaining a look from the man next to him in the elevator. 

He looked middle aged with a perfect tailored black suit and primped hair, greased back into an ivy league sweep. The man locked eyes with Hongjoong momentarily, gauging the young boy swaddled in a thick navy Armani wool and cashmere coat and charcoal slacks. The man gave him a nod before stepping out of the elevator on the 3rd floor. 

“I did not think San and Wooyoung would get their shit together before Yunho and Yeosang did, but I stand corrected,” Hongjoong continued. 

“San and Wooyoung have never, and will never, get their shit together,” Seonghwa responded with a choppy sarcasm dripping over the line. 

“I mean the whole feelings thing.” 

“Ew,” Seonghwa wrinkled his nose. “Feelings.” 

“You do know what those are right?” Hongjoong teased. 

“Of course I do! How could you doubt my omniscience?” he gasped with a sarcastic air. “Just give me a map. I’ll mark it for you.” 

“Wow,” Hongjoong drawled. “So helpful.” 

A static of rustled sheets resounded in the background before Seonghwa spoke up. “I’ve recently converted to not being an asshole. It’s going really well I think.”

“No, it really isn’t,” Hongjoong said. “Are you still in bed?” he added, slightly judgmental, looking at the numbers fly by on the elevator panel. 

“Well, it’s all relative. I could not be hurting you right now, but out of the goodness of my heart, the purity of all my inten-” 

Hongjoong cut him off. “Oh my god, just stop.” 

“It’s not my fault! I was born this way.”

“What? An asshole?”

Seonghwa laughed mockingly. “I have like negative five emotions. Leave me alone,” he quipped. 

Hongjoong arrived at the door to the suite to find it firmly locked. “Dude, the door is locked.” 

Seonghwa hummed nonchalantly. 

“Seonghwa!” 

“Yes?”

“Open the door?” 

“Nah,” the boy breathed back and the fluff of a body hitting pillows echoed through the phone before the line cut dead. 

“Why would I help you now?” he shouted a second later, his own voice projecting through the door. “All you’ve done is insult me!”

“Seonghwa, open the fucking door!” 

“No! I’m over it!” 

“Over what? You were barely doing anything in the first place.” 

“I’m a lord you can’t insult me like this.” 

“You’re a lord?! You said you weren’t British?!” 

“Not under this name,” he laughed. 

“Seonghwa, let me in dammit.” 

The door was silent for a beat before Hongjoong heard the other’s footsteps retreating. “Don’t really feel like it,” the boy’s called out, growing fainter as he left Hongjoong alone at the locked door. 

“When Jongho gets back, I’ll have him guilt trip you!” Hongjoong called out. 

“When Jongho gets back, I’ll open the door!” was the response he received in return. 

And he did, for Jongho, reluctantly allowing all his involuntarily adopted children to filter in after the favourite and take up residence on one of the many sleek white minimalist chaises, chairs, and sofas situated in the suite’s entertainment parlour right off the marbled foyer. 

“You could have broken in,” Yunho suggested to a grumbling Hongjoong who had not stopped complaining about the prolonged wait he endured. 

“It’s a nice hotel,” Hongjoong shrugged. “Didn’t want to cause any damages.” 

“This place is fancy,” Jongho breathed out, gingerly sat on the edge of a chaise placed in front of picturesque sprawling windows. 

“Looks like my winter house,” Mingi mumbled, shoving dried squid chips into his mouth. 

The package, a horridly vibrant yellow and red, crinkled in his hand as he shoved it inside. He then went to wipe his hand on the cushion of the chair he was encased by but his hand was smacked away by San’s foot, reaching across the space to reprimand him with an inadvertent display of the boy’s flexibility. 

“Is that it?” San huffed. 

“Is what it?” Hongjoong asked him, craning his neck from his own position laid across Seonghwa on the divan. 

“Am I done?” San droned. “Have I done my ‘duty?” he put in air quotes as he asked the elder. 

“Yeah, whatever. Didn’t do much,” Hongjoong waved him off. 

“I made sure this one didn’t die!” 

A smile broke out on Wooyoung’s face. “Because you like me,” the boy teased, rolling onto his stomach on the plush rug to raise his head up, propping his chin between his palms. 

“Are we not going to talk about this?” Yeosang asked Seonghwa, seated on the elder’s side, across from San and Jongho both curled into the sofa on either side of Yunho and Mingi’s oversized wingback. 

“About the children?” he asked to clarify, inclining his head toward San who was now attempting to kick Wooyoung and the other who was gleefully dodging the hits with cheerful banter. “It’s not like I didn’t see it coming.”

Yeosang’s faced scrunched up. 

“Are you perhaps jealous?” Seonghwa smirked. 

“He is but he’ll never tell you,” Hongjoong butted in, head draped onto the back of the divan near Seonghwa’s, legs hung over the boy’s lap. 

“I didn’t know you were privy to my business,” Yeosang pouted at him, crossing his arms. 

“Someone’s got to keep you all in line,” Hongjoong answered. “And if it was up to Seonghwa, you’d all be dead save Jongho and…. well,” he thought aloud. “Maybe the two of us. I’m basically saying he’d let the trio and the explosion die,” he explained. 

“Oh my god, shut up!” San screamed, standing from his crouched position on the couch and throwing his body at Wooyoung on the floor, slamming the boy into a headlock. 

Yunho stared on at the two with a disinterest face. 

“Is no one going to do anything?” Jongho spoke up. 

Mingi continued to lick his fingers free from the power which now coated them. Hongjoong let his head fall back further and released a hearty breathe, relaxing his body into the cushions as Seonghwa patted his knee. Yeosang dropped his head onto Seonghwa’s shoulder and yawned. 

“Why would we?” the eldest questioned. 

“They could hurt each other.” 

“Let me tell you something,” Bredon interrupted. “Wooyoung is the only person who has ever gotten away with slighting San. In their first year, San asked him to the commencement gala and Wooyoung said no. The guy San ended up taking to the gala was dead by the end of the night. Wooyoung got off scot free.” 

“What does that mean?” Jongho asked. 

“It means Wooyoung is safe from the one person who could kill every single one of us in this room and have the guts to do it,” Yunho responded. 

“It means Wooyoung is basically invincible,” Seonghwa laughed. 

“Okay but what about…” Jongho raised his arms in an expectant offering of palms. “…the whole reason I dragged you all here?” he finished. “What are we going to do about that?” 

“So the things is,” Hongjoong started and received nothing but contemptuous judgment in response to his tone. “No hear me out. The thing is I don’t want to send Wooyoung in. We all know why.”

Wooyoung looked as if he was about protest and then thought the better of it and gave in, crumpling his body back onto the floor in acquiescence. 

“I don’t think San wants to go,” he continued, looking to the other for confirmation and receiving a frightening smile. 

“Right. And Seonghwa…”

“Doesn’t really want to be banned from New York,” the boy finished for Hongjoong. 

Hongjoong sighed and spoke up after a moment, most of the eye’s in the room still on him minus San and Wooyoung for what the hell reason it was they were quietly whisper-arguing. “I also do not want to go.” 

“Why?” San perked up, addressing toward the elder. 

“I don’t like bombs.” 

“Yếu kém,” San quipped with narrowed eyes before turning back to clip Wooyoung on the back of the head for no reason. 

“Wait, but that leaves Yunho, Jongho, and I?” Yeosang added, eyes wide in realization and an uncomfortable tense settling over his muscles. 

“What about me?!” Mingi shouted offended. 

“You were a given,” Seonghwa answered him. 

“I get to go?”

Seonghwa lifted his arm from Hongjoong’s leg and pinched the bridge of his nose. “The fact that you’re surprised is clearly an indication that’s not what I meant.” 

“You want me to go with Yunho again?” Yeosang reiterated. 

“You want me to go with Yeosang?” said boy parroted. 

“You want me to go with THEM?” Jongho added. 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Yeosang asked the young boy angrily. 

“Yeah,” Yunho tacked on. “What’s wrong with us?” 

“So much,” Hongjoong mumbled softly to himself. 

Jongho looked to Seonghwa for help, pleading with wide eyes and a silent quivering lip. “Do I have to go?”

“YOU’RE THE ONE WHO MADE US COME HERE!” Wooyoung shouted. 

“But they’re fighting,” Jongho continued to pout. 

“Yeah, bud. Honestly, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” Mingi defended the youngest. 

“You’re both being dicks,” Yunho mumbled. 

“We benefit from the lucrative happenstance of misfortune,” Mingi retorted. “Shut up.” 

“You know what’s worse than warmongering,” Yunho rhetorically asked with an air of annoyance. “Betraying bro code.” 

“I’m a bro,” San raised his hand. “Can confirm. That’s a low blow.” 

“But do I have to go?” Jongho asked Seonghwa again. 

“We could always just send Yunho and Yeosang and blackmail them so they can’t argue,” Hongjoong offered. 

Yeosang leaned across Seonghwa to loom in his face. “What dirt could you possibly have on me?” 

“Seonghwa told me about Jimin.” 

“You fucking asshole!” he slapped Seonghwa. 

“Woah, woah,” the boy reeled back. “If you’re going to be slapping anyone, it should be lover boy over there!” 

“Don’t encourage him!” Yunho yelled. “And I’m not going!” 

“Why can’t I go?” Mingi insisted again, folding his body over the arm of the chair and leaning toward the humble of figures that was Seonghwa, Yeosang, and a borderline asleep Hongjoong. “I really want to go.” 

The remarkable thing about those three, outwardly the most sane and put together of their little haphazard hodgepodge and inwardly perhaps the most volatile and disastrously inspired, was their convictions: buried motivations and immeasurably powerful spirits veiled beneath calm calculated demeanours of passive apathy. It was their cold hard gazes and their relaxed dispositions, sprawled and reclined, indifference radiating in their wake. But when angered, when wronged, and when betrayed, it was, in all certainty, the worse possible combination of people to be up against. 

“No one, for one second,” Seonghwa directed slowly. “Has ever given you a responsibility to hold and we sure as hell are not starting today.” 

“But-”

“Sit down, Mingi,” Yeosang grit out quietly, a quirk of his eyebrow not from amusement but in the careful challenge of a knight raising his voice against a king. “I’ve decided for you.” 

Hongjoong’s soft yawn broke the tension in the air around them - Wooyoung and San having quieted down into an embrace that suspiciously mimicked a wrestling manoeuvre, Mingi’s whimpering wallow in response to being the recipient of two impossibly unsettling gazes, Yunho slouched down with hands stuffed in his armpits, and of course, Jongho, their little miracle. 

“So, you’ll help me Yeosang?” Jongho asked quietly. 

Yeosang turned to him with a smile, so gentle and easy he already knew the answer. It was here now that Jongho finally understood the horde of soldier which followed the other around. The army of chemists, and spies, and engineers which fell to their knees at his feet receiving nothing more than an acknowledged nod. Yeosang was, quite possibly, the most dangerous of all. It wasn’t because of his aptitudes, or his network of staunchly loyal supporters. It was his will. It would not bend; it would not break. 

And so, of course, they went: Jongho all the while wondering what exactly someone could have done to earn Yeosang’s wrath weighed down upon them so greatly he dared no longer speak of them. 

Maybe, there was something else to be scared of.


	28. How Long is Forever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> God I don't really know if this is the way to supply closure ??

“I came because you did!” 

Yunho halted in the corridor, the echo of his footfall off the brick tunnel underground ceasing as they were stopped by the implications of the words which Yeosang had slung out of his mouth suddenly in response to Yunho’s incessant badgering. Yeosang had been silent, refusing to respond to any of his onslaught of questions and remarks, letting them roll off his back in stride. But Yunho knew now, at the mention of those words, that hadn’t been the case. They had been lodging into the boy’s body like tiny daggers and arrows, piercing his thick skin and inserting a poison into his mind which lingered like clutches of moonlight as the dawn approached. 

He and Yeosang now stood inside the back entrance of the headquarters, ID badges attached to their blazer lapels, bearing their faces but not their names. And it was here of all places Yunho finally realized he would receive an answer to all his questions. 

“I thought you wanted to help Jongho?” he replied softly, back still turned to the other and words quiet. 

“I thought you wanted to help Jongho?” Yeosang said. 

Yunho turned around slowly, and noticed just how small Yeosang looked standing there, surrounded by the empty presence of the building and compressed under the impending exchange  
Yunho had both been fearing and hoping would happen. 

“I’m batshit terrified of saying no to Seonghwa,” he explained, locking eyes with the other. “That’s why I came.” 

Yeosang looked down at his feet, hands balling into fists at his thighs. 

“And you came for me?” he asked. 

The boy didn’t answer. 

“Yeosang…” he tried again, walking toward him but each step felt like a thousand, taking more and more courage to approach the frightfully shivering thing before him. 

“You came for me,” Yunho breathed, except this time it wasn’t a question. 

“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” he admitted. 

Finally he noticed a tear on Yeosang’s jaw line, the faint mark of its trail visible on the other’s cheek as Yunho raised his face with a tender touch of palms. 

“You came for me,” he said again. 

“I was scared, okay?” Yeosang bit out: a lip trembling, teeth gnashing, spit flying bite. 

“I’m confused,” Yunho admitted and it surprised him. “I don’t exactly know where we stand and that scares me.” 

“Nothing scares you,” he grumbled back. 

“Well, I’m scared of losing you. Half of the days I’ve known you, I’ve lived convinced I could make you make you love me back, and the other half…” his voice trailed off. 

“You idiot,” Yeosang mumbled. 

“Am I stupid for waiting?” he asked. “Or stupid for hoping at all?” 

“I-”

“Because I don’t know if I can go another day without knowing the answer.” 

Yeosang turned his back on Yunho and stared walked passed him down the corridor, ignoring the question with a small huff. 

“I’ve gone crazy trying to understand you,” he said which made the other slow down as he shouldered by him. “But I don’t mind it one bit. Not at all.” 

“So it’s my fault this happened? All this?” 

“No, that’s not what I-”

“So I owe you answers just because you tacked your heart on your sleeve? Just because you decided you deserve to know?” 

“What the hell am I supposed to do to fix this if I don’t even know what happened in the first place?” 

“THIS ISN’T ABOUT YOU!” he yelled. “Stop trying to make it about you.” 

“THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?! YOU COULD HAVE JUST TOLD ME!” Yunho screamed at him and his voice resounded in the concrete space. 

“Because he doesn’t matter!” Yeosang yelled back, already flustered and fuming from whatever silly disagreement had progressed into this situation as was often the case for the most recent days. 

“Hey, you’re not supposed to be-”

Yeosang’s hand sprung up, hand aligned with arm aligned with shoulder in a straight line from his body, gun at the ready at the end, finger having instantly pulled the trigger at the very start of the stranger’s sentence. Yunho stood across from him, eyes still locked with the other, his own arm having shot out simultaneously in a wide arc, hand floating in the open air having just let a knife fly from the tips of his fingers. The man immediately fell to the floor, bullet in his head an knife in his chest, dead upon the cargo bay floor. 

“Clearly he does matter if you’re still in love with him!” Yunho spat out, not faltering in their battle stinging words flung toward each other with a harboured frustration so large it consumed his insides. 

“You thought I was in love with him?!” Yeosang blurted. “What the FUCK? Who told you that?”

“No one told me! They didn’t need to! You refuse to talk about it! You lock yourself when someone mentions his name. Seonghwa has been acting really dodgy about the whole thing whenever I ask.” 

Yeosang scoffed in response and crossed his arms, “This is really not the time or the place to be doing this right now.” 

“Well, it’s the only time I’ve been able to really talk to you in the past week.” 

“Oh please, you haven’t even tried.” 

“Because I know you won’t listen!” 

“You want to know? You really want to know about it that badly?”

“Yes!!” 

“Fine then,” he quipped and that was that. 

And it was that the most beautiful of all things, slowly crumbling until there was nothing left but sadness. The way his shoulders dripped in acquiescence and the way his downcast eyes fell void of even anger, not wanting to fight anymore. Yeosang stood there, dripping in vulnerability and fragile: so fragile a breathe could break him. 

“Park Jimin…” he whispered. “He was my friend, and then he was my family, and now he’s the person I resent most in this world.”  
\--- --- _  
It was a blisteringly hot summer, boiling and breathing enflamed bursts of sunlight down upon the world. It was before Yeosang ever came to Genius, a young soul pilfering the hearts and minds around him from a small age, birthed and raised for greatness. Jimin, his childhood friend, had just graduated from the Factory._

_Jimin was, and still is, some sort of a legend. His government dissertation was one of the best Genius had ever seen. Yeosang knew in their first year Whitehall and Hideo remembered the dark impending shadow of an infamous fourth year and praised the ground he walked upon like every other soul in the school. He knew the way people worshipped his name in between giggles shared in hallways and notes scrawled on assignments. But no one knew him the way Yeosang had. No one except for Sungwoon._

_In this story, it was important three nameless people were mentioned: Sungwoon, Pikh, and Yeosang. Jimin’s story started way before his dissertation and even Genius. The work had started in 2013, the amnesty bill, the Shinawatra family topple, the constitutional amendment proposed: the Thai protests. Jimin and Sungwoon… no one remembers Sungwoon. Jimin and Sungwoon started planning half way through their third year and saw the outcome of their fruition just before graduation rolled around. But, only one of them would be partaking in the celebration afterward because only one of them made it there. Supasek Amornchat, “Pikh”, was a freshman at Genius that year. Ask Whitehall or Hideo about him and they could tell you the kid’s entire life story but not what became of him after he left the school._

_Anyways, the Thai protests. Taking place over the year between 2013 and 2014 they became one of the greatest Genius projects of all time, Jimin taking all the credit and two kids left in shadows, one forever and the other in the hiding. The thing was Jimin made a deal with Pikh who was the famed son of the Shinawatra syndicate. The boy had it made, Jimin was blood thirsty for success, and Sungwoon was… well Sungwoon was their best friend._

_As soon as the protests hit their worst, Pikh turned Sungwoon in to Interpol. Supasek had been was living in London and made a deal with the local authorities for the name and address of the conspirator behind the events of that year in Thailand. Jimin reaped the rewards from the turmoil they both had set up and allied himself with the resistance government behind Sungwoon’s back. Pikh wasn’t invited back to Genius but Interpol rewarded him greatly for his cooperation._

_Sungwoon, after being turned in, was discredited and disinherited, ostracized from his family and friends to be locked so far away Yeosang could never see him again. The Factory had found him. They were mad. Genius kids didn’t get caught. They didn’t let Yeosang go to the funeral. He didn’t know if there even was one._

_He knew what Jimin did to garner the fame which floated like rose petals in his wake. He knew what bones Jimin had built his altar on, and in the current of the tumbling unadulterated praise the other received, Yeosang remembered. He was never one to let go. And, eventually, he confronted him._

_“Yeosang, shut up!” Jimin growled before calming down to address him once the other had indeed quieted. “Don’t you know what I’ve done? I’ve won. I beat him. I beat everyone.”_

_“But it was Sungwoon…”_

_“Let it go, Sangie,” Jimin coaxed. ”You don’t want to lose me too, do you?” he asked softly, reaching forward._

_“It was Sungwoon,” he breathed out, tears welling in his eyes. “It was the Sungwoon that helped up steal the bills from Uncle Haka’s safe. It was the Sungwoon that helped us trip the wires on the second story windows so we could sneak out and go to that concert. It was the Sungwoon that helped you hold my hair back the first time I ever drank and couldn’t hold it, the Sungwoon that convinced me I could fight off the ocean with fire.”_

_“It was the Sungwoon that stood by your side for all your goddamn years as you grew and failed and lived together,” Yeosang ranted. “He’s fucking family, Jimin! You two are my family! Family isn’t worth shit and you know I always believed that!” he kept screaming at the elder, fully crying at this point. “So I chose you! And I chose Sungwoon!”_

_Yeosang’s body crumpled and his face hurt from the tears, his eyes throbbed, and his chest ached. “And what the hell am I supposed to do now?” he chocked out barely above a whisper._

_“You forget,” Jimin simply said. “You forget and you move on. You let the sacrifice he made fuel you.”_

_"Sacrifice?! Sounds more like collateral damage!”_

_“So what do you want?” Jimin questioned the younger. “What do you want from me? Want me to say sorry for doing my job?”_

_“I don’t fucking know what I want!” Yeosang exploded. “No! You know what I want? I want you to have not fucking turned Sungwoon in!”_

_“What other choice do you have now besides letting it go?” Jimin asked him cockily, fully believing the world had fallen at its knees before him and succumbed in a bow of submission at his throne._

_“I could turn you in,” the younger muttered in response._

_Jimin’s smirk, faltered. “I’m sorry, what was that?”_

_Yeosang lifted his head, speaking words he had barely processed into being. “I said I could turn you in,” he repeated._

_Jimin darted forward in a sudden jab which rocked Yeosang’s very foundations once he had realized what the other had done. But, by that point, his cheek was already burning with a biting sting and there a faintly warm drizzle running down his face. Yeosang’s pupils were wide as he reached a quivering hand up to touch his face. It stung as he drew his fingertips away, now covered in a small sheen of blood, his own blood._

_“You… you cut me,” he murmured, shellshocked and quiet, stumbling backwards from the boy._

_“You said you would turn me in!” Jimin defended, spitting the words out of his mouth._

_“You cut me!” he realized, anger growing now more than surprise._

_“BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO TURN ME IN!”_

_“What the fuck happened to you?” Yeosang breathed, scared and small and betrayed to the point of a broken heart. “What happened?”_

_“I won,” he said. “And if you can’t handle it, maybe you aren’t mean to.”_

_The scar. It was highly unlikely he could ever forget the burning sear of his childhood friend, his chosen family, as he threw him to the ground and left him for dead in the middle of his family’s old camping house but that scar made Yeosang relive it every time he saw his own face in the mirror. Jimin, after ruining the one good thing in his life, had let the vicious grips of power wield his arm as he plunged the same knife that marked Yeosang’s cheek into the boy’s thigh and left a screaming, bloody Yeosang on the floor of the cabin, alone and sobbing.  
_\--- ---

“I loved him like a brother and he managed to kill my very best friend in the world and then rip the love right out of my chest.” 

Yunho remained silent, holding him tightly, their guns having clattered from their hands int the floor, hands wrapped around each other in a vice of desperate support. 

“You remind me of him sometimes,” he said. “The way people look at you. The way they all adore you.” 

"Sangie,” Yunho said grabbing his cheek and holding the other’s gaze to his. “I know I can’t bring him back, either of them, but I know that I can't remember a day I spent without loving you and I promise I won’t ever stop." 

"How long have you waited to tell me?" Yeosang asked softly. 

"A very long time."


	29. You Got That Feeling of Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This feels like a filler and I apologize for that but hey that's okay. Also this is genuinely how I envision yeosang to react to any form of flirting or attention

“Why are there so many fucking guards?!” Yeosang hissed. 

And there really were. Yunho stood outside the elevator on the second floor, watching a funnel of navy clad men and women filter around the corners at the end of the hall and from doorways lining the corridor. The diplomats and staff had been pushed back into their offices, door guarded by the security team as Yunho and Yeosang stood, the former cradling the box so gingerly, careful not to tilt its content off kilter, and the latter working on his anger management. Well, Yunho thought, at least this was a productive outlet. 

Yeosang became a flurry of incensed infuriation provoked to the point of a consuming rage which flung his arms and guided his fists. No one who stood before him had any chance of winning or escaping unscathed. It was the unbridled spirit of a jilted soul unsheathing years of betrayal onto the faces and figures of those surrounding him, bruising and pummelling it into their vulnerable flesh. 

His knuckles bled, flinging splatters across the cheeks hollowed from the pressure of his blows. Yeosang’s thigh ached from the contraction of muscles as they lifted and jabbed forward sacking chests and toppling bodies. The torrent of incompetent people fell to ground in writhing agony one after another, sometimes two at a time.  
Yunho sighed and leaned against the wall with a puff of his chest. His eyes trailed after the other as he escaped tasers and batons and fits and kicks. It was a barrage of useless hope that tumbled ceaselessly to the floor in Yeosang’s wake. A man skidded across the floor and ended up at Yunho’s feet, ankle broken and twisted horribly in an undesirable direction. He looked up at the boy with pleading pain stained eyes. 

‘Help,’ he mouthed out desperately. Yunho shrugged and, only when he heard frantic heavy footfalls, looked up to see Yeosang stalking slowly over to them both. Without an ounce of hesitation said boy raised his foot above the man’s face and stomped his head in, rendering the poor guy immediately unconscious. 

“Have I ever told you how breathtakingly beautiful you are?” Yunho breathed out in admiration. 

“Oh, baby,” Yeosang responded. “I don’t need anyone to tell me.” 

Yunho chuckled briefly at the other’s response before sincerely meeting his eyes and asking, “Feel better now?” 

“Immensely,” Yeosang huffed out, catching his breathe. “But I really need to work on my cardio…. Well, what do we do now?” he asked after a weighted paused, chest rising and falling in a slowly settling pattern. 

“I don’t know,” Yunho shrugged again. “Just get the box out?” 

Yeosang swatted his arm with a scowl before the boy had even finished his sentence. “Stop shrugging with the fucking box!”

“Well, guess what? You hitting me does not help at all,” Yunho chastised back at him. 

“On a scale of one to ten how mad do you think the school is going to be?” Yeosang asked him suddenly as they waited for the elevator, the faint hum of its travel background to their ears as they watched it ascend from the basement. “Like Wooyoung can’t get kicked out, and Seonghwa and Hongjoong are so close to their independent projects, but the rest of us… I- I can’t go home.”

“Hey,” Yunho calmed him, hand on the boy’s arm rubbing comforting circles and eyes holding more sincere depth than an ocean of whispered confessions. “You never have to go home again, okay? I won’t let that happen.” 

The way Yunho looked at him in that moment made Yeosang almost believe him and every gentle promise he had made, almost. 

“I hate to say it,” he responded softly, “but it’s not really you’re decision to make, is it?” 

The faint ding of the elevator’s arrival reared in the space before Yunho responded. 

“We could steal an agenda?” Yunho thought aloud. 

Yeosang whipped around to him. “What?”

“We could… go steal the agenda for the next summit... Why not?” Yunho continued. “You already took out most the guards for me. I mean it wouldn’t stop anything, just set them back a few years at most until they could schedule the next one, but-”

“Yunho, you’re a genius!” he exclaimed, vaulting himself into the taller boy’s arms in pure excitement, arms encircling his neck and smile lighting up his own face. 

“I missed you, Sangie” Yunho mumbled in return, snaking his arms about the smaller boy’s waist. 

Yeosang pulled his head back from Yunho's shoulder with a confused look. “What do you mean? I never left.” 

“I missed the happy you,” he said. “The smiling you,” he added, gently reaching a hand up to touch the shorter’s cheek. 

Yeosang groaned and wrestled out of his touch, but there was a disgustingly bright smile on his face as he did so. “Nope, too sappy,” Yeosang said as he pulled away. 

“I know your sappy,” he grinned. “I’ve seen it.”

“Regrettably,” Yeosang grumbled as he entered the elevator. 

Yunho followed him in silently. The door closed and not a second later he grabbed the other’s hand in his abruptly. “I’d wait a million years just to see it one more.”

Yeosang’s jaw dropped. He paused and stood there flabbergasted, a confusing judgment passing over his features, clutching his hand back from the other and holding it to his chest as if burned. “What the hell was that?”

“Flirting,” Yunho answered. “I was flirting.” 

“Good lord. I liked you better when you weren’t so charming.” 

“You think I’m charming? Because it’s all for you and only you,” he winked. 

“Do NOT do that again,” Yeosang ordered sternly, jaw tight. 

“What? Tell you how much I love you.” 

“This is awful and I do not like it.” 

The elevator opened on the fifth floor and Yeosang filed out with a pout leaving Yunho to trail after him with a smirk. 

“And I love you all the same,” he said sweetly, running to catch up to the small boy, intertwining their fingers as they waltzed down the UN hallways looking for classified action plans and hiding the flaming blush on both their cheeks. 

They were greeted with San’s pinched eyebrows once they returned, the door held open by an extended arm and the boy leaning against the threshold with a lazy slant. “You stole the action plan?” 

“Well, the draft but yeah,” Yunho corrected. 

Mingi’s head popped up from behind San and he rested his chin on the other’s shoulder with a sleepy smile. “What draft?” he asked. 

“Yunho took the summit meeting plan so we won’t get yelled at,” Yeosang answered him. “At least yelled at less,” he added with a wince. 

“But I already made a contingency plan!” 

Yunho paused and balked at the other. “You made a plan?” 

Hongjoong’s voice drifted in from behind the two, yelling from the sitting room. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Dear god, what did you do?” Seonghwa joined. “Did you do what I explicitly told you not to do?” 

Mingi stepped back from San and the two returnees and craned his head toward the elder boys. “Was it that explicit?” 

“Yes!” Hongjoong defended. 

“I told you not to fuck anything up!” Seonghwa added with a seething bite. 

“Who’s to say I fucked up? I thought it was useful?”

“I just wanted them not to yell at us,” Seonghwa explained quietly. 

“I want that too, but we can’t all get what we want,” San grumbled, finally stepping back from the door as Yunho and Yeosang passed inside. 

“What did you do?!” Hongjoong questioned, grabbing a dazzled and oblivious Mingi and shaking him in a frenzy of exasperation. “Just tell me!” 

“Can we just go home now please?” San groaned, slumping into the sofa with a whine. 

“Why?” Wooyoung snorted from beside him. “You missed dinner plans or something?”

“Oh my god Soyeon,” San breathed in realization. 

“WHAT DID YOU DO??” Hongjoong yelled again but Mingi merely smirked silently, indulging in the chaotic breakdown of the elder before him. 

“Does anyone care about the draft?” Yunho asked the room who remained completely uninterested. “No?” 

“Do I have to get on a boat again,” Yeosang asked him, tugging on his arm. “I don’t want to get on a boat again,” he pouted. 

“Where’s Jongho?” Yunho questioned, ignoring him which made the other pout more and hang off his body in a childish fit. 

“TELL ME!” Hongjoong screamed at Mingi’s mischievously soft laughter. 

Seonghwa rolled his eyes and returned to the magazine he was reading. 

“I didn’t tell Soyeon,” San deflated. “She’s going to be so mad at me.” 

“No, seriously where is he?” Yunho asked louder this time. 

“Why are you ignoring me?” Yeosang continued. 

“Speak, you insolent child, or I will cut your tongue out!” 

Mingi continued with his breathy laugh, shoulders shaking faintly as he watched Hongjoong nearly tear his hair out. 

“It’s fine, I’m sure she’s fine,” Wooyoung placated a sulking San. “Felix radioed me and I only answered in a language he doesn’t know. If anyone has a reason to be peeved it’s him.” 

“WHERE’S JONGHO?!” Yunho bellowed. 

“TELL ME GODDAMMIT!” Hongjoong screamed just as loud. 

“STOP YELLING!” Seonghwa interrupted the two boys. “Mingi has all his fingers and Jongho wanted a bagel. Now shut up!” 

“Didn’t have to be so loud,” Yeosang quipped back quietly. 

Seonghwa threw him a beyond irked glare which had the younger boy huffing and crossing his arms but quieting down, nonetheless. 

“Okay, but what am I supposed to do with action plan?” 

Seonghwa turned to Yunho with a sigh. “I really don’t care. Use for wallpaper or something,” he waved him off. 

“I crashed a plane at LaGuardia,” Mingi whispered to Hongjoong. 

Hongjoong groaned, drawling his hands down the length of his face with taught muscles in his hands. “You don’t even have a pilot’s licence.”

“I don’t have a plane either,” the other smiled.


	30. Anti-climactic Covert Operations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! i'm still here

The main rule of thumb for any clandestine affair, as San would tell you, is that there is danger is numbers. Of course, a mass is more noticeable than a mouse. That’s basic camouflaging. And most undoubtedly, those who you do decide to take alongside you into such activities are chosen after a painstaking process of weighing skillsets versus body count and deliberating about functioning dynamics and intended outcomes. There are some people who make great teams and some people who are just expendable meat for the grinder. Yeosang knew this from his brief jaunt first year in the introductory funnels to clandestine. All of these are the ideal outlines for covert operations. And, as he well knew, sometimes things don’t always go as planned. 

“I cannot believe that of all the people I could be left with to break back into the school I ended up with you two.” 

“Did you want Mingi?” Wooyoung asked him, seated beside Yunho as the three squished onto the sea shelf beneath the gym’s foundation at the back of the island. 

Yeosang levelled them with a cold gaze. “You know, maybe I rescind my statement. This is fine. Now, can you hand me the bolt cutter?”

Yeosang looked down at a sudden warmth in his hand, eyes fixing onto the palm which had subtly slipping in next to his and the fingers grasping it lightly. He looked back up again to Yunho’s cheeky smile and rolled his eyes, before snatching his hand away. 

“I’m serious. Give me the bolt cutters.” 

“We don’t have bolt cutters,” Yunho replied. 

Yeosang’s brow furrowed. “Then why didn’t you just tell me?”

The smile came back to his face and his eyes softened as he replied, “Because I wanted to hold your hand.” 

“You could have just asked,” Yeosang muttered annoyed. 

“Okay, can I hold your hand?”

“No,” he rebutted without hesitation. “Get me bolt cutters.” 

“Can I hold your hand?” Wooyoung’s voice pipped up. 

Yeosang whipped his head around to face the other so fast he almost lost his footing on the narrow shelf they were perched upon and thrust a hand out to Yunho for steadying. 

“Why?” he asked once he had regained a semblance of balance. 

Wooyoung seemed to think about it for a second. “Because I want to,” he eventually supplied with a shrug. 

“Sweetie,” Yeosang smiled, “You can always hold my hand.” 

“This is bullshit,” Yunho grumbled, hand still latched firmly around Yeosang’s bicep lest he take an unintended tumble into the sea below. 

“No, this is payback.” 

“For what??”

“I don’t know. I just feel like you probably deserve it for being stupid.” 

“Did he do something stupid?” Wooyoung inserted, although it seemed more an introspection of he himself attempting to recall. 

“Inevitably yes,” Yeosang answered him. “Always.” 

“This is baseless persecution. I have rights.” 

Wooyoung perked up. “Did you hear about that Pakistani pigeon arrested on spy charges? Does he have rights?”

“Who? The pigeon?” Yunho inquired, genuinely confused, and exchanging a look with Yeosang beside him. 

“People really need to stop victimising innocent birds,” Wooyoung mused. 

“I thought we were talking about me?”

“Oh right,” Yeosang paused. “You’re an idiot,” he concluded, pointing at Yunho before turning to Wooyoungl. “Moving on, bolt cutters?” 

“But does he have rights?”

Yeosang cocked his head slightly to the left, “Yunho or the pigeon?” 

“The pigeon! Obviously!” 

Yunho reached out and tapped Yeosang’s shoulder. “Okay, but do we or do we not have to open the gate in the next 2 minutes?”

“But the pigeon…”

Yeosang suddenly, threw his arm out in accusation, wrenching something from his bag beneath Yunho’s hunched figure. It the dark and showed recess it was an almost indiscriminate object before his voice rang out in agitation. “They were right there the entire time! Yunho you were fucking sitting on them!” 

Said boy held his hands up in defence. “I didn’t notice.”

“How the HELL could you not-”

“Hey, who’s that guy?” Wooyoung interrupted, face leering over the side of the cliff and toward the back of the gym. 

“Goddammit,” Yunho groaned. 

“Do you think he knows about the pigeon?” Wooyoungl called down to their hunched bodies from his extended position. 

“Shut up, they’re going to hear us!” Yeosang chided in an acidic whisper Wooyoung was too used to for it to make any sort of authoritative impact on him. 

“Wait is that…” Wooyoungl squinted into the darkness at the looming mass in the distance. “Is that Tag?” he finished, body half crawled over the lip of the cliff and smashed against the security gate ringing the island. 

“Oh my god!” Yunho chirped, jumping up to join him. “Hey, dude!” he called through the gate. 

Yeosang squeaked out a desperate groan as Yunho’s foot kicked out and knocked the bolt cutters out from his grasp, sending them tumbling away from his reach and into the black waves. 

The figure, Tag, jumped at the sudden noise and looked around before settling on the two boys clinging to the gate. “Where the hell have you guys been?”

“Kidnapping a child against their will.”

Yeosang rocketed up next to them in response. “That is NOT how you should phrase that! It was Jongho!” 

“Oh hey, Yeosang,” Tag waved to him, seeming unbothered at the sudden appearance of his three classmates were desperately attached to the outskirts of the school, hovering above the torment of ocean beneath them after having been missing for a week. “Can I like, help you at all?” he offered after a beat, gesturing to their hanging bodies. 

“Yes,” Yeosang sighed. 

“Have any bolt cutters?” Tag asked to which Yunho was falling backwards in crippling pain as Yeosang kneed him between the legs. 

\---

Seonghwa ran forward in a small crouch, tips of his fingers dusting the dampened stone as he propelled toward Hongjoong’s hiding place. The edge of his blazer got caught on the rough surface of the stone, ripping the very outer edge of his woollen tweed, and knotting it slightly. 

“Darn! My blaze-”

“Shh…” 

Seonghwa looked over at Hongjoong in astonishment, eyes bugged as an affronted scoff rocketing from his mouth. “Did you just shush me?”

Hongjoong ignored the other, gaze still trained over the edge of the embankment. “Yes but you need to-”

“You shushed me!?”

“Seonghwa-” Hongjoong started to implore, looking over his shoulder at the boy. 

“How dare you shush me!” Seonghwa scolded him, throwing his voice out in a sudden prioritization of his dignity over their current situation. 

“Can you please just-” Hongjoong tried to coax the elder. 

“Shh!” 

Hongjoong turned back from the wall slowly, facing Seonghwa who bore, if possible, the most passive aggressively self-satisfied smile Hongjoong had ever seen on another person’s face. 

“What?” Hongjoong balked. “Why are you telling me to shush? I’m not the one yelling?”

“You interrupted me why can’t I interrupt you?” Seonghwa quipped, crossing his arms, back no longer folding over in a crouch and voice definitely no longer strained from attempting to control his volume. 

“Because I was doing it for a reason!” Hongjoong defended. 

“Who’s there?!” a voice called out from beyond, exactly where Hongjoong had just been monitoring. 

A beam of light fell across the open stone, shining in the darkness against the limestone and creeping inch by inch closer and closer to them as the guard’s sweeping arm drew across his chest. 

“You should have been more quiet,” Seonghwa simply said. 

“Are you fucking serious right now?”

“Am I ever not serious?”

“I’d describe you as more of an unamused apathy, but sure. We can go with serious if you want.” 

“Hey! Who’s there!?” the guard called again. 

“Really?” Seonghwa bit out, unaffected by the imminent threat. “You shushed me and now you’re insulting me?” 

“I was not insulting you,” Hongjoong sighed. “But even if I was this would not be the time to discuss it.” 

“So you were definitely insulting me?” 

“No…, yes? Ugh- shut up!” 

“We’re talking about this later,” Seonghwa shot his glare at Hongjoong before shooting toward the advancing man to deal with stress relief the Genius way. 

\---

Jongho stood, jaw dropped, shoulders tensed, above a sea of the school’s naval department writhing on the floor of the boathouse with dislocated, well, pretty much any bone that could be dislocated. 

“I’m so scared of you,” he mumbled sadly, turning to San. 

San shrugged and wiped the blood off his lips from where he had ‘unintentionally’ required the need to bite a man’s nose half-off his face. ‘Unintentionally’ he claims because he should have passed out sooner and they were on a tight time schedule. 

“Won’t you get… I don’t know… detention or something for this?” Jongho asked him. 

“How would they know San did it?” Mingi added. 

“Well gee I don’t know,” Jongho mocked. “Maybe the bite marks?” 

San shrugged. “It’s fine. I think Yunho got us off the hook for at least 2/3 of the things we pulled off in the past week.”

“What about the other third?” 

Mingi slung his arm around Jongho’s shoulder with a smirk. “Well, that’s when you thank me for learning the basics of aviation in 20 minutes from a YouTube tutorial.” 

San sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You should be more scared of Mingi,” he told Jongho. 

“But he’s an idiot?” 

“I can go….” Mingi offered, taking his arm back, offended. “You want me to leave?”

“Oh go cry me a river of blood,” San rolled his eyes. 

“What? A river of blood?” Jongho thought aloud. “That doesn’t even make sense.” 

“Oh my god wait! He hasn’t seen the ---” San turned around with a gasp of delight. 

Mingi grinned so broadly Jongho thought the skin at the corners of his smile would split right open. “You haven’t seen the ---?!” he added with glee. 

Jongho began to step away from his two unbridled classmates. “What’s the ---” he started to ask before the realization that whatever wonderfully horrid thing they could possibly be referring to, and the curiosity he held for it, was certainly not worth the mischievous look in their eyes. Jongho had learned that when Mingi and San agreed on something it was impossibly terrifying and to be avoided at all costs. And so he booked it back to his dorm, leaving the two excited elders to clean the remnants of staff by themselves.


	31. One Might Call Them Repercussions

Amazingly, or perhaps by divine intervention, or quite more likely as a result of an illegally traded transnationally amassed sum, 7 of them got off scot-free from their apparent absence because apparently the transgressions of their escape, truancy, and disruption of the precarious rhythm of the factory were filed under the collateral damage of their contemporaneous illicit activities. To put it simply, as Seonghwa had restated for San and Wooyoung, they were off the hook because Yunho stole a very important document which would require painstaking, long-endured effort to rewrite and Mingi had, evidently, crashed a plane. 

The 8th had remarkably received quite an earful although not from the administration. Hongjoong sat under the careful, watchful eye of his classmates in the cyber department as he was bombarded with jabs about his idiocy. One does not simply leave school in the midst of their dissertation preparation, especially when that someone had promised to help run diagnostics on another’s dissertation out of comradery and loyalty which was now marred by the tarnish of betrayal. At least that was how Minho had phrased it. All in all, their eventual and impromptu excursion had resulted in nothing more than a little lost time and a very angry classmate. Maybe it was luck and maybe it was just how life worked out when you owned the world. But, of course, there were other minor consequences. 

Mingi shuffled through the door to the Kensington and plopped his bodily heavily down next to Yunho on the faded red chaise which sat beneath the large ornamental portraiture of the lobby. Hongjoong was sprawled on the floor next to San, head resting on the younger’s thigh as he sat against the sofa. Seonghwa curled his lanky figure into the smallest of Queen Anne chairs, the legs squeaking as he shifted his weight. He was engaged with Jongho in a heated debate about how best to remedy insomnia. Jongho was growing less and less certain over time that a little Benzene wasn’t the answer. 

Mingi’s heavy sigh drew the attention of San and Yunho, the former cut off in the middle of a story about what Wooyoung considered a romantic gift, which was by the way, not remotely romantic. 

“I failed my exam,” Mingi sighed unpromoted. 

“What exam?” San asked. 

“Exactly! How was I supposed to know we had one?” Mingi exploded. “I wasn’t even here!”

“You know” Yunho added. “Me too. I forgot to turn in my stock market projections for the next quarter! Totally unfair.”

Seonghwa looked up from where Jongho sat next to him. “Yeah, but you knew about that before you left.”

“Are you backing up Mingi???” Yunho questioned throwing his hands into the air. 

“You’re all idiots,” Jongho whispered. 

Unfortunately for him, Seonghwa overhead and raised his eyebrow at the younger’s audacity which quickly led to a horrified expression and much grovelling. 

“You’re the one who made us leave school!” Yunho yelled. 

“No,” Jongho corrected with the drawn out arrogance only muttered when brushing off the most offensive of culpabilities. “I propositioned Hongjoong and Wooyoung and they turned me down. I didn’t even talk to you.” He looked over at San. “And I never would have asked-” he started to defend before catching the glare which hardened over the other’s eyes. 

‘Say it’ San mothed silently in his direction with the tensest jaw Jongho had ever seen. 

“I was hanging on the edge of mortality,” Hongjoong defended. “I don’t believe I really said anything.” 

“I’m responsible for you, you ungrateful child,” Seonghwa reminded him. “I had to come!”

Jongho shrugged in response as if he too was well aware of Seonghwa’s claim on him, or any of them really. 

Hongjoong added a small, “I am responsible for no one,” crossing his arms and settling down further into San’s lap. 

“But-but you’re my dad?” Mingi pouted. 

“Yeah,” Yunho added. “You’re our dad.” 

“Shut up!” Hongjoong yelled back, rocketing up from the floor. 

San leaned across the carpet toward Jongho and softly threatened, “Just because they’re arguing about familial relations, you are not off the hook.” 

Jongho turned back to Seonghwa defeated. 

“You called me an idiot,” the elder shrugged him off. “I’m not helping.” 

“I thought you were responsible for me?”

“But he doesn’t have a death wish, now does he?” San responded smirking. 

“Why on earth do you claim this human being?” Jongho asked Seonghwa. 

The other thought about it for a second, studying the wickedly satisfied smile which spread on San’s face. “The face which you fear as your enemy must instead be endured as that of your ally,” Seonghwa answered carefully. 

“YOU’RE MY FUCKING DAD AND YOU KNOW IT ASSHOLE!” Mingi’s voice carried over, equal parts endearing and intimidating. 

“YEAH SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Yunho joined, now fully grasping Hongjoong by the shoulders. “YOU’RE MY BEAUTIFUL FATHER!” 

“I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO FILE TAXES!” Hongjoong screamed back into Yunho’s face. 

“WAIT!” Mingi screamed all of a sudden with such conviction it instantly quieted the room. 

A faint noise of protest for the cacophony they were raising was heard muffled through the walls which they all, collectively, chose to ignore. 

“Does this mean…” Mingi started to ask gaze locked onto San eyes blown wide with enlightenment. “That you don’t want Kang’s phone number anymore or…?”

San pondered the question for moment. “No, give it to me. It’s good threat material.” 

“So you almost threw him off a building so that one day, maybe, if Wooyoung was being a dipshit, you could scare the dumbass out of him by texting Kang?” Seonghwa threw in amazed. 

“In hindsight yes,” he said. “That is exactly what I did.” 

“Fair enough,” Seonghwa shrugged. 

“I was DANNGLED,” Mingi raised his voice in offense. “OFF A BUILDING.” 

“Wait, are you saying it didn’t even work?” 

They all turned to Jongho. 

“What?” Hongjoong asked. 

“Is Mingi saying that San holding him off a building didn’t even make him break?” Jongho continued. “Like San never got the phone number did he?” 

Yunho hummed in affirmation, a pensive hand on his chin. “You know, he has a point. I would have expected that to work.” 

“What kind of idiot favours a phone number over his own wellbeing?” Seonghwa snipped. 

“Me, apparently,” Mingi grumbled. “Where’s Wooyoung? He wouldn’t attack me like this?” 

He looked to San who shrugged nonchalantly in response. 

“You don’t know where your own boyfriend is?” Yunho scoffed, crossing his arms. 

“Do you know where Yeosang is?” he questioned back. 

“No,” he pouted. 

“They have a long overdue talk,” Seonghwa said uncharacteristically softly. “It was about time. And if any of you interrupt them,” he continued. “I will eviscerate you.” 

And it was overdue. It was very much needed. The past is so easy to bury, so easy to forget when its packed down into the earth, unmarked and untraceable, by the butt of a heavily wielded shovel. But, the intentional relinquish of some regrettable days was better mended than kept. It was a new found sanctity which Yeosang found in his friends and in himself in finally confronting the thing which plagued his nightmares. It was a hurt, but a good hurt. 

“You know,” Wooyoung mumbled from beside him on the roof. “It’s kind of hard, sometimes.”

“What is?” Yeosang asked, turning on his side to look at his best friend through the waving rays of a falling sun. 

“Being in charge,” Wooyoung simply answered, hands tucked behind his head as he gazed at the sky. 

“ _You’re_ not in charge of anything,” Yeosang assured him with a soft laugh, the slope of the roof causing his body to rock and back slightly at the chuckle. 

“No, I mean us, all of us. And it’s not like I don’t want to be. I like power and control and praise but sometimes,” he quieted down, shrugging. The falling slouch of his shoulders as they descended took with them all the sharp edges usually armoured on the boy and rolled it off him like thunder after a storm.   
Yeosang lay quietly there in his stillness, as he had many days before. There was a sort of nostalgic feeling which crept up whenever the two found themselves on a roof in the waning of a day. 

“Sometimes,” Wooyoung continued. “It get a little exhausted.”

“Don’t we all?”

“Well yeah,” he huffed. “But that’s not the exhaustion I’m talking about. I mean it’s like a fuse that always has to be lit and if it’s not than it ceases to work at all.”

“Like a serum with a shelf life?” Yeosang asked with a knowingly melancholic smile. 

“Yeah,” Wooyoung breathed in affirmation. “Like that.”

“Just means you’re human.”

“…”

“Nothing any of us can do. I know we try,” he paused. “And I know it feels like we’re better. But, the truth is… at the end of the day, we aren’t.” 

“I kind of like being a human sometimes,” Wooyoung mused: unguarded, exposed, soft. 

“Me too,” Yeosang breathed out as he felt Wooyoung’s head slant sideways to lean on his shoulder. 

It was the touch of a familiar friend, one who was more family than most of his family at this point. 

“You know I’m sorry, right?” he said. 

Yeosang bristled, confused. “What?”

“For Jimin,” Wooyoung explained. “I’m sorry he did that. I didn’t know that was what happened to Sungwoon and I didn’t know Jimin turned him in.” 

“It’s okay.” 

“No. It really isn’t,” Wooyoung bit out. “He lied to me.” 

Yeosang laughed mocking and cutting in a blurted huff before he caught himself. “No. I meant you don’t need to apologize. We’re okay,” he said with a light smile. 

“Oh.”

The understanding smiles of his friends had been enough for the pull band-aid from his bullet wound and cause him to go scrounging for the darn thing still encased in his arm, enough to finally acknowledge the blood which dripped from the wound and to stitch it up once and for all. 

“Thank you,” he said. 

“Why?”

“For being sorry.” A gentle smile rose on Yeosang’s face. “We’re okay,” he said again but Wooyoung knew this time it meant something else. 

“Yeah,” he whispered, settling down. “We’re gonna be okay.” 

“…and I got this new highly flammable odourless mist I want to try out,” Yeosang grinned. 

“Oh, hell yeah it’s flammable!”


	32. Godspeed my friend, Godspeed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is technically the last chapter but i'm adding an epilogue 
> 
> Also now I have an idea for a Golcha art heist centered addition to the Genius universe so look out for that 
> 
> If you like this story, please check out the ongoing the boyz and loona branch of Genius called Quartermaster :)

If you had asked Hongjoong how he felt that morning, he would have said excited, nervous maybe, wholly unprepared. The world was getting larger, his screen fading and giving way to boundless opportunities. He could talk about how he was one of the pioneers in starting the space centre within the Cyber department or about crazy, wonderful people he had met along the way. He could tell you about meeting Seonghwa for the first time and almost stabbing the kid clean through the back with a knife, accidentally of course. He may have even softened up and admitted to being a little sad to be here. But no, not now. Risen from the warm cocoon of his bed, the sun long past its cosy morning rays and the school awoken, he would have said he felt ready. 

“I’m a real renaissance man,” Mingi said from his position sprawled on Hongjoong’s bed, the bare mattress rough on the boy’s back. “And by that I mean I might have typhoid fever.”

“Why on earth would you possibly think you have typhoid fever?” San asked from Minho’s desk chair. He had his ankles crossed on the empty desk, reclining in the seat like he owned it, which technically now Minho did not so the claim would have been valid.

“Because I have a headache, duh,” Mingi mocked as if the answer was obvious. 

Hongjoong was ready to not have to deal with whatever you could classify the b.s. that came out of Mingi’s mouth as. He turned around from the mirror, tie haphazardly angled along the neckline of his freshly crisp white oxford. “Alright who let you on WebMD?” 

“I haven’t been on WebMD since you rewired all my computers. I asked Seonghwa.”

San raised his eyebrow, drawing his legs down the desk to rest upon the floor. “And he told you that you had typhoid fever?” he questioned incredulously. 

“Well,” Hongjoong sighed, tugging his blazer out from under Mingi’s leg where it rested on the bed with a swift yank. 

The other boy raised his head and shot him a death glare before tiring of it and slumping back down. 

“He can’t be wrong,” Hongjoong continued, shrugging the fabric on. “Good luck with that, buddy.” 

“Is that why he’s confused all the time?” San joked, turning to him with a mischievous smile. “I thought it was because he was an idiot.”

“San! The man is dying!” Hongjoong mockingly berated. 

“I’m dying?!” Mingi’s voice seemed genuinely concerned. 

“You would come in here?” Hongjoong rose his voice in a dramatic fashion. “And die? On this, the day of my graduation!” 

San chuckled and motioned him over. Hongjoong walked over and San wound his hands up to fix the elder’s tie, securing it snugly around the collar of Hongjoong’s shirt with deft fingers before patting his chest and turn back to Mingi. 

“Mingi, sweetie, let’s go find Wooyoung, okay? Give Hongjoong sometime with Minho when he gets back?” 

Mingi huffed and grumbled and rolled himself off the bed, but didn’t leave without clapping Hongjoong on the back wordlessly and nodding a suspiciously teary eyed and tight-lipped smile at him. 

What San didn’t know was that Wooyoung was not where he had left him that morning with the explicit promise that he would not, under any circumstances, approach Seonghwa and cause the other to lament his existence. Which, to be fair, he wasn’t with Seonghwa. 

When Wooyoung was greeted at the door to his friends’ dorm room, the two roommates hours away from graduating themselves and a lingering sense of nostalgia stuffing up the air, the last ‘gift’ he expected to receive as a party favour was Vermeer’s The Concert . He also, in all his years, had never remembered Tag or Seungmin saying anything about the walls of their room being filled with priceless Renaissance and Baroque paintings. He now began to think back and perhaps he hadn’t ever been to their room before. How could he have missed the alarmingly large framed masterpiece that was Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee hanging, and rather precariously he might add, above Tag’s bed? 

“What exactly am I supposed to do with this?” he asked, hands awkwardly grasping the heavy portrait. 

“I don’t know. Whatever you want,” Seungmin shrugged. “Not my problem anymore.” 

“Burn it!” yelled Tag from the middle of a circle of his friends, all very much doused in high spirits. 

Wooyoung looked around the room and saw what he expected to be an actual Matisse portrait. It was stuffed under the bottom of their window sill, leaning against the wall next to a slew of paintings in golden frames stacked to at least knew height upon the floor. 

“Is this real?” he asked Seungmin. 

Seungmin looked over to where Wooyoung was pointing. “Tag has a penchant for Dutch Baroque,” he simply answered. 

“Did you use legitimate masterpieces to decorate your dorm room?”

“Well, we’re not going to use fake masterpieces to decorate our dorm room,” Seungmin laughed in response. 

“Aren’t those from the-”

“Come,” the elder interrupted him. “Celebrate. It’s a special day.” 

Around an hour later, by the time he made it the graduation venue on the cliffs of the freezing sea, wisps of tall grasses and whispers of a murmuring mass of students drifting in a soft breeze, he spotted Yeosang pacing back and forth with the most troubled look he had ever seen.  
Yunho was watching him with a careful eye, hand reaching out to graze the other’s elbow when he thundered past. Mingi was… Wooyoung did a double take. Was that a leech San was holding to the other’s elbow? 

“Hey, guys,” he walked up. “Where’s Jongho?” 

Yeosang whipped around. “Jongho? Where’s Jongho?!” 

Wooyoung made eye contact with Yunho who shook his head discreetly behind Yeosang’s back but Wooyoung wasn’t following. 

“Yeah, where’s my little dude?” he asked. 

“Quite frankly I don’t give a shit!” Yeosang yelled at him. “Hongjoong is waiting back there with the rest of the responsible children,” responsible he growled so menacingly Wooyoung wanted to check under his fingernails for blood, “and waiting for fucking Seonghwa of all people to show up!” 

“Seonghwa’s late?” Wooyoung asked after processing what he had said. 

“YES SEONGHWA’S LATE!” Yeosang responded, the frustration viscerally ripping through his vocal chords and making it palpable. 

All of a sudden Yeosang’s phone went off and he wrenched it out of his pocket before slamming his fingers down on the answer button. “YOU FUCKER!”  
Jongho jumped on the other end, glancing at Seonghwa with a sheepish expression of equal parts guilt and fear. 

“Where are you?” Yeosang growled. 

“We’re coming. We’re coming. I promise,” Jongho assured him. 

“We needed you here like 40 minutes ago!” 

“I know! I’m sorry!” 

“Put Seonghwa on, now,” Yeosang commanded. 

Jongho gingerly held the phone out to Seonghwa who stood there in bare feet, mud caked across his ankles and splattered up his calves, shirt torn on the left side to scatters of fabric which brushed against the shallow gash along his torso right from the middle of his ribcage to his hipbone in a jagged streak. 

“Hey,” he greeted the other casually. 

“Don’t you ‘Hey’ me, asshole,” Yeosang snapped. “You better get here in the next ten minutes or I will personally eviscerate you.” 

“Trust me,” Seonghwa muttered with a soft laugh. “I also did not want me to be doing this.” 

Yeosang grumbled in response. “I am beyond mad at you right now. Don’t you dare laugh.” 

“Okay, Okay,” the boy sighed. “Just hold it off for like 15 minutes and I promise I’ll be there.” 

The chairs were lined up in row upon row in the grass, just shy of the cliff’s edge, sea battering the stone below in an ambient crashing that filtered up the rock side and became drowned out by the laughter and hollers of the students milling about the stage. Tiffany was there with a bright smile and an even brighter sunhat as large in circumference as the antique sailor’s globe in the government department’s library. 

“I can’t keep stalling Grad forever!” Yeosang hissed. 

He was interrupted from reprimanding the elder any more when Mingi leaned forward in a fit of uproarious laughter, clutching at his stomach. 

“Stalling Grad…?” he mumbled with an impossible stretched smile spread across his face. “Stalingrad? Anyone? No?” 

Yeosang looked murderous. Yunho reached around and clamped a hand over his friend’s mouth, effectively muffling the other.

“Thank you,” Yeosang mouthed sweetly to him. 

Hongjoong stood there surrounded by his friends, or… most of his friends and couldn’t help but change his mind. Yes, if you had asked him how he felt about graduating earlier he would have been confused how to answer, a swirling tempest of every emotion under the sun washing over him every other second. But now, now he knew how he felt. And it was simply happy. 


	33. Epilogue/Bonus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I personally believe if the Genius kids came up with an alternative to 'netflix and chill' it would be 'studying the blade'  
> (ironically at first, of course, but I think I would really catch on)

Mingi had never been in this situation before, never, which was neither surprising nor unsurprising. He’s sure at least someone he knew had been in this position once before. It seemed statistically improbable that this was the first time it had ever happened to a Genius kid, particularly the ones with which he associated himself. And it wasn’t like he was saying something about his friends, it was just that they were more adventurous than others, and perhaps with a little less self-preservation than was normally doled out to children. The likelihood that someone, at least one person, could help him was high. And then he remembered something. 

“Hi, what’s up?” a voice came out from his phone, all chipper and smooth and comforting. 

Mingi smiled. “Oh nothing really, but how are you?”

“I’m good, yeah,” the voice responded. “Haven’t seen in a day or two. Did you and Yunho go on another bender again?”

A light chuckle escaped from Mingi’s mouth and he was sure that if, in this situation, he was laughing then maybe, just maybe, San was right and he needed to seek help. “Nah. Just been… busy I guess,” he replied. 

“No. No. I get it,” the other drawled in response and Mingi could almost see the smaller boy waving his hands about in dismissal, all large swooping motions elegant and exaggerated. 

“Hwan?” he called out. 

“Yeah?” 

“We can study some blades when I get back, yeah?” 

“I’m sorry what?!” the boy paused and drew in a breath. “I mean… yeah! Sure. I’d really like that.” 

“Good,” Mingi answered with an audible smile. 

“Good,” Hwanwoong parroted. 

It was silent for a moment, except for the repetitive clank of the buckle he refused to wear, hitting against his seat. It swung violently against the leg of the chair, making a discreet ding every second as it made contact. 

“Is that why you called?” Hwanwoong eventually asked. 

With the innocent question Mingi was thrown back his senses. “You’re a pilot right?”

Hwanwoong’s laughter peeled through the phone, causing Mingi to rear his head back from the device. “I’m a what now?” the boy chocked out through giggles.

“A pilot.”

“Who told you that?” Hwanwoong asked obviously amused.

Mingi was confused, beyond confused and wondering if he had indeed called the right person to help him out of his current predicament. “You did?”

Hwanwoong made a muffled noise of confusion, like a humming in his throat before blurting, “I did what now?”

“The other day,” Mingi explained. “At our gov class, National Animosity Fostering. You said you wished you were flying.”

“…”

Mingi sighed at the silence. “Flying, you know, like flying planes,” he added. 

He was met yet again with nothing on the other end. He chanced a look over at his phone which rested precariously in his lap, nestled there for safe keeping in the torment of his situation. His arms accidentally followed his head and tiled down which was, on the whole, the worst mistake he had ever made. Yes, that included the time he superglued Felix’s hand to the econ lobby wall and the other responded with hiding open lighters in Mingi’s dorm room. 

“I said I wish I was dying,” Hwanwoong said slowly, now just as confused as Mingi. 

“Oh well, my bad, but you’re gonna be real happy about this either way.”

“Happy about what?”

“I don’t know how to fly a plane.”

“Why would you need to know that?”

Mingi looked out the cockpit window, at the clouds and trees rocketing by. He felt oddly calm in that moment, the sensation of his body entrapped in a giant metal bird which was recklessly falling through the air, fighting desperately against gravity and his own idiocy. It was a peaceful dread which washed over him.   
He took a deep breath and eventually got out the words, “Because I am currently flying a plane.” 

“YOU’RE WHAT NOW?!” Hwanwoong’s screech demanded. 

On the other end of the line, Mingi could hear a voice he recognized as Keonhee yell out in a very Seonghwa aggravated fashion, “Dude, stop screaming!” 

“SORRY, BUT I THINK THE SITUATION WARRANTS IT!” was Hwanwoong’s response. 

“And what would that be?” 

“MINGI IS CRASHING A PLANE!” Hwanwoong’s distant scream tumbled over the phone line and into Mingi’s ear, causing him to jolt in surprise. 

“MINGI IS CRASHING A PLANE?!” Keonhee echoed, equally as loud, if not louder. “GIVE ME THE GODDAMN PHONE!”

A series of thuds and stifled words of protests were thrown back and forth before Keonhee’s ragged breathing became clear. “MINGI, YOU’RE CRASHING A PLANE!?” the boy demanded. 

“Yeah I think we pretty much established that by now, but just as a reminder I do still very much need help,” he answered. 

“WELL, I DON’T KNOW HOW TO FLY A PLANE!”

“ME NEITHER!” Mingi bellowed back. 

“THEN WHY DID YOU FLY THE PLANE IN THE FIRST PLACE?!” Keonhee accused him, a frustrated blame laced in his tone. 

Before Mingi could defend himself or even think of how to defend himself, he heard Hwanwoong calmly tell Keonhee, “This is not the time for accusations.”

“Bullshit this isn’t the time! This idiot stole a plane!” Keonhee roared. 

“I don’t think the stealing is the important part here. I think the crashing is,” Mingi murmured into the air, unsure whether the phone even picked it up. “Just my opinion though.”

Simultaneously he distantly heard Hwanwoong screech, “KEONHEE! HE’S GOING TO DIE!”

Keonhee instantly came back on the line and repeated a frantic, “MINGI, YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!”

“I KNOW THAT’S WHY I CALLED YOU!” he shouted. 

“YOU DIDN’T CALL ME YOU CALLED HWAN!” Keonhee screamed back. 

“Yeah he called me! Give the phone back!” Hwanwoong’s voice filtered through the phone. 

“You don’t know any better than I do!” Keonhee accused him. 

There was a muffled rustle before a gentler breath came on the phone. “Mingi?” Hwanwoong’s soft voice asked cautiously. “You still there?”

All too fast and all too slow, the world hurdled toward him. It was like the earth desperately reaching out its hand to reclaim him, except well, it was rather him running, head first and blind, into the open jaws of forever. He rocked back and forth gently in his seat, hands tightly gripping the wheel in front of him. Mingi looked down slowly, an eek of his neck, and noticed the tendons of his knuckles white and bulging against the bone there in an aggressively desperate vice. 

“Surprisingly yes,” he managed to answer. 

“Okay…” the other boy exhaled. 

Mingi was stupid. He’ll admit it, he might even be the first in line to scream it from the rooftops if he was caught on a bad day. But never like this. Never stuck in a shaking, frenetic mass of regret that propelled him through a blue sky above a city he never partially liked and attempted, in vain he might add, to explain the situation to his… well to Hwanwoong. 

“Where are you?” 

Mingi cleared his throat, snapping out of his premature mortal reminiscence. “In a plane,” he answered. 

“No, you idiot,” Hwanwoong sighed. “Where’s the plane?”

“Crashing.” 

“WHAT ARE YOU CRASHING INTO?” Hwanwoong immediately screamed. 

Mingi looked out at the trees for a moment before remembering. “I think it’s called Harriman State Park?” 

“You’re in new York???” came out from his phone next but it was oddly placed amongst the situation, not the tense and volatile exchange they had been having but a genuinely curious remark. 

Mingi imagined Hwanwoong sitting there, brows furrowed together and eyes distant as his lips parted in around questions. 

“Is that more confusing than the fact that I’m flying a plane?” 

“Crashing!” Keonhee called out in the background. “Crashing a plane!”

“Wait you’re next to La Guardia then!” Hwanwoong realized. “Just go to La Guardia!” 

“The airport?” Mingi thought aloud. 

“YES, THE AIRPORT!” Hwanwoong screamed back. 

He heard a faint scoff on the other end of the phone. “No. The tiny mayor Fiorello,” Keonhee mocked in the background.

“NOT HELPING!” Hwanwoong screamed at the other. 

“Was Fiorello short?” Mingi mused. 

The nearly feral grunt this elicited from Hwanwoong was not a pleasant noise to experience any more than Mingi thought it was pleasant to make. “THAT IS NOT WHAT YOU SHOULD BE CONCERNED ABOUT RIGHT NOW!” 

“Sorry,” he muttered. 

After a second of Mingi scanning his horizon line, Hwanwoong’s quiet voice muttered out, “He was five-two.”

“DAMN THAT’S TINY!” 

“Hwanwoong gets it,” Keonhee laughed distantly. 

“I AM 10 CM TALLER AND I AM GOING TO KILL YOU IF YOU DON’T DIE IN A FIREY HELL PIT OF METAL AND BAD DECISIONS!” 

Mingi was amazed than he had not indeed died in a fiery hell put of metal and bad decisions. Perhaps there was someone up there looking out for him, a divine intervention. But then again, he didn’t think they would be very happy with the mess he created at one of the world’s largest airports and really, well, who was he trying to impress if they didn’t like that?


	34. Epilogue the second

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I saw that cute E'Last and Ateez interaction and I had to do something about it 
> 
> It's short and stupid but hey why not

“Wonhyuk, chill on the tequila,” Baekgyeul scolded the young boy. 

Rano just graduated, his best friend and tutor through all the hardships of the government department, and Baekgyeul was reeling. It felt like he was loosing a brother. He wanted time to think, really sit down and just grapple with the idea that Rano wouldn’t be there next year. He had managed to distract himself from the thought of the leaving. But now, amidst thumping music and slurred giggles and bubbling sing-songs of the crowded room around him, Baekgyeul was about to break down at the most inopportune time possible. 

And then somehow, someway, Solji’s little brother, who they both knew from their old schooling and conjoined Christmas and holiday celebrations at every excuse to throw festivities and break out the Insignia, Chandon, and that old Jamaican rum Rano’s grandfather kept stored under their bar, was there and he was making it worse. 

“Do you think he’s here?!” Wonhyuk’s eyes widened. 

“It’s his party. Yeah I think he’s here.” 

“I don’t know. He could be one of those Gatsby figures. Really cool party. Disappears.”

Baekgyeul rolled his eyes and leaned passed Wonhyuk to grab the punch ladle and refill his glass. He recalled someone vaguely referring to it as ‘Fish House Punch’ which was apparently an old American civil recipe secret to a select few of old money monkeys who made the ghastly alcoholic orange tinged drink. 

“How on earth are you related to Solji?” 

“Do you see him anywhere?” Wonhyuk spun about, ignoring the now senior and searching for his idol. 

Baekgyeul distantly registered Rano talking with some other graduates near the lounge’s bay windows. A girl in the sill, bottle of vodka by her side and skirt riding high on her legs which were crossed at the knee right beside Rano’s hip. The elder had always been one to make… friends, he supposed he should call them. It was a skill, Baekgyeul thought, for Rano to somehow amicably end every hook up he ever had. 

“I don’t even know what he looks like!” the younger continued. 

Baekgyeul allowed himself to give Rano some privacy and left him to stand there without his watchful eye. “He has a lip piercing and a beret on. I don’t think you can miss him.”

“He has a lip ring?! That’s so cool!” 

Baekgyeul grabbed the drink from the boy’s hands. “No more for you.” 

“But I like it,” Wonhyuk pouted back, making grabby hands at the glass which had been ripped away from him. 

“You’re also like 12, okay?” 

As Baekgyeul waited for the other to respond with some gripe about his age, Wonhyuk suddenly announced, “Oh! There he is!” 

“Wait, no! Don’t-” Baekgyeul grappled, trying to grab a hold of the young boy and stop him from marching across the party and into Hongjoong’s face, which is exactly what he did. 

“Your dissertation is the coolest thing ever!” he blurted in the elder’s face. 

“My… you already read it?” 

“Yeah!” 

Hongjoong laughed. “Well, uh, thanks,” 

“I’m serious,” Wonhyuk rambled. “You’re like a genius or something. I mean space weaponization! So cool! I didn’t even think about doing trans-orbital kinetic kill missiles until I read your paper and like… woah,” he said awed. 

“Wow, you really did read it,” Hongjoong breathed out, impressed. 

“Who let the kid in?” Seonghwa asked walking up beside his friend and gesturing to the younger. 

Baekgyeul placed an arm around the boy’s shoulders, ready to steer him away. “He’s mine.” 

“Baekgyeul, hey!” Mingi called out, arm extending high above the sea of students, glass at the top sloshing over onto their heads. 

“Are you a student here?” Hongjoong asked Wonhyuk who was almost vibrating with excitement before him. 

“No. I’m coming in two years!” 

“Two years?!” Seonghwa spat his drink out. “How the hell did you get here?” 

“Baekgyeul!” Mingi shouted again, waving his arm around and spilling yet more of his drink onto the students. “Baekgyeul, it’s me!” 

“How the hell did he get here?” Seonghwa asked Baekgyeul, whose arm was still tightly wrapped around Wonhyuk, scared he might flee into the packed room and be lost for the second time that night. 

“Leave him alone,” Hongjoong prompted Seonghwa. “The kid’s a right cyber prodigy. Might get into the space division,” he winked. 

Wonhyuk exploded. “There’s going to be a space division?!” 

“Seriously, who brought you here?” Seonghwa asked again and Baekgyeul was going to respond expect for the fact that Mingi, with a certain rambunctious clandestine student in tow, had now made his way over to them. 

He panicked as Wonhyuk managed to extract himself and breathed a sigh of relief as he realized he was, thankfully, occupied in a very intimate conversation with Hongjoong about the boy’s dissertation research. 

“Baekgyeul!” Mingi announced his presence with a clap on the other’s back. “What are you drinking? Can I get you another?” 

“I didn’t know you were friends?” Seonghwa said looking between the two. 

“They’re not. Mingi’s shit-faced,” San answered. 

“Also-” Seonghwa started turning to Baekgyeul. 

“He’s a friend,” the younger answered, already anticipating the question. “Rano had him invited and he’s a legacy kid. It’s fine.” 

Seonghwa seemed to nod in understanding. “Cool,” he said and then walked away as someone passed and whispered something about inappropriate behaviour happening in the bathroom into his ear. 

“Dude, why don’t we hang out more?” Mingi drawled, draping himself across Baekgyeul’s back causing the other to stumble at the added weight. 

“I don’t know?” 

“Mingi, come on,” San insisted, tugging on the boy’s arm. 

“No!” the other grumbled, latching onto Baekgyeul. “I’m making friends in my own department! Don’t you always tell me to do that?” he argued. 

“I said to make friends on your own level,” San corrected. 

“Oh.” 

“Also, Hwan is here,” San added with a smirk. 

“Yay!” Mingi popped up and released Baekgyeul, who smiled to san in thanks as he dragged Mingi to the other side of the room. 

The now free boy turned back to the window in search of his older friend and was met with a completely different group of people than before. He tapped Wonhyuk’s shoulder beside him. 

“Where’s Rano?” he asked the younger. 

“Oh, he went to bathroom.” 

“Fuck!” 

“Hey, do you swear around him?” Hongjoong scolded him. “He’s too young for that shit.” 

“Yeah!” Wonhyuk joined with a shit-eating grin. “I’m too young for that shit!” 

Baekgyeul was not doing any better now than he was at the beginning of the night. “Can you watch him for a second?” he threw to the graduate, not bothering to stay and hear Hongjoong’s confused affirmation or Wonhyuk’s deliriously excited exclamation.

Baekgyeul weaved through the throng of bodies, some sweaty, some hot to the touch, and others wandering themselves towards people and booze and the cool comfort of air vents. He finally broke through the line of people at the open doors to the lounge and stumbled into the less crowded hall, only a couple people milling about here and there. 

There was a group of students circled around the door to the bathrooms and Baekgyeul prayed, he prayed what he thought was happening was not. As he drew closer he heard a second year, Sunwoo he thought, talking whispering with Seonghwa. 

“I know those sounds,” the younger said shaking his head. “I’m not opening that door. Never again.” 

Baekgyeul walked over soundlessly and stood behind the two, not quite catching Seonghwa’s reply before the boy walked over to the door and pounded on it. 

“Yunho!” Seonghwa yelled. “I expected better from you!” 

Baekgyeul stepped back, confused and glanced around the congregation of people who barely knew before his eyes settled on a familiar figure at the end of the hall, leisurely leaning out a window with a cigarette perched between their fingers. 

“I was looking for you.”

Rano swivelled his head and smiled when he met the other’s face. “Haven’t been up to much, really,” he said. “Where’s Wonhyuk?” he added as an afterthought. 

“He’s fine.” 

Rano faced the window and took another drag. “Are you enjoying the party?” he asked the younger, words tumbling from his smoking mouth and into the night air. 

“Yeah.” 

Rano set his cigarette down on the bare window and positioned is body so he was squarely facing the other. “That doesn’t sound convincing.” 

“It’s weird,” Baekgyeul admitted. 

“What’s weird?”

“Thinking about the Factory without you…”

A gentle affection passed over Rano’s features and he pulled the newly christened senior into his air, a hand going up to ruffle his hair as he held him. 

“Thanks, Baek,” he said. “Glad to know I’ll be missed.” 

“Yeah,” Baekgyeul answered with a nostalgic undertone into the other’s chest. “A whole lot.”


End file.
